Discovering early signals of technological opportunities: Insights from interdisciplinary innovation

Interdisciplinary research is important for achieving original scientific innovation. As a carrier of knowledge advancement, scientific literature records the early stages of the integration process, providing a critical data source for identifying early signals of technological opportunities. This paper proposes a theory-driven analytical framework that identifies potential interdisciplinary topics and assesses their innovation characteristics to detect early signals of technological opportunities arising from interdisciplinary integration. The framework begins by constructing a multidimensional knowledge network from scientific publications to clarify disciplinary structures and innovation trajectories. Through analyses of interdisciplinary potential and knowledge integration processes, potential interdisciplinary topics are identified as emerging interdisciplinary foundations for innovation. Building upon these topics, bibliometric and social network analysis methods are used to comprehensively measure multiple innovation characteristics during the dynamic evolution of disciplines. An empirical analysis in the field of rice genetic improvement confirms the feasibility of the proposed method and demonstrates its capacity to identify early signals of technological opportunities. This study enhances the ability to detect such signals and offers valuable insights for researchers and policymakers.