Bridging Trends and Patents: Combining Different Data Sources for the Evaluation of Innovation Fields in Blockchain Technology.

The evaluation of various innovation fields of an emerging technology as well as their potential impact on a certain market, region, industry, or target group is a part of an innovation manager's day-to-day business. Such evaluations are usually based on a combination of information from a variety of data sources, which are used to decide whether to invest in the advancement or adoption of a technology. With the aim of supporting this decision-making process, we combine different data sources to identify and evaluate innovation fields by semantically bridging trend and patent data. We apply our method in the context of blockchain technology, show how trend data can be used and operationalized to identify innovation fields, and illustrate how patent data can be used to evaluate these innovation fields. Our data reveals that trend and patent data complement each other and that hybrid or multihybrid approaches to evaluate a technology's development lead to additional insights for the systemic anticipation of future perspectives as well as research pathways of innovation fields.