Organization-oriented technology opportunities analysis based on predicting patent networks: a case of Alzheimer’s disease

This study aims to investigate how to test and assess the dichotomy of roles from an organization-oriented perspective for technology opportunity analysis, in context of the development of technological knowledge networks. We present a future oriented framework based on the link prediction methods. An empirical study of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) related patents was conducted to illustrate this framework. The results show that link prediction indices are feasible and effective for predicting emerging links. Organizations differ in their predictive ability as knowledge providers and being predicted as knowledge consumers. The framework and results in this study offer a new clue to understand innovation activities and broaden organizations’ technological frontiers.