Predicting the potential industrial fields of technological spin-offs by using IPC in patent analysis

· R&D projects sometimes generate technological seeds which have application potentiality in unintended field. Examples can be seen in defense, aerospace and nuclear power industries. In these industries, huge amount of public investment is continuously spent in long term and advanced technology with high technological level is required and achieved. Even in the case where the projects which seems to be failed, technological and economical spinoff effects are expected by utilizing collateral technologies. However, there were a few empirical studies to quantitatively assess the extent of technological spinoffs. And it is less effort to detect and predict the fields where technological spinoffs will occur in the future. · The purpose of this paper is to evaluate spin-off prediction method in order to detect technological fields that have plausible and diverse applications in other industries by using bibliometrics and network analyses of patent publications. We observed transition of technology transfer between fields with time-series analysis of co-occurrence of IPC (International Patent Classification) codes among patents. · The results suggested a possibility to utilize our approach so that we can detect the potential technological and industrial fields where breakthrough by innovative seeds in other fields can open a new direction for those fields.