Quantitative Horizon Scanning for Mitigating Technological Surprise: Detecting the Potential for Collaboration at the Interface

The above sentiment has been expressed many times by many people in recent times ([1]; also [2, 3, 4]). Signals extracted from the scientific literature concerning emerging technologies may be useful in predicting when and where technological breakthroughs might be expected ([2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]). These two ideas together suggest our main premise: that emerging relationships between disparate fields may presage potential scientific breakthrough, and that prediction of such breakthroughs based on analysis of the scientific literature may be possible. In his 1976 paper “Guarding Against Technological Surprise,” George Heilmeier wrote that “[t]echnological surprise is not a term that conforms to but one definition” ([15]). For our purposes, “Mitigation of Technological Surprise” (MTS) is defined here as the identification of potential breakthroughs before they happen ([16]). (Note that it is the surprise we wish to mitigate; not the technology.) In this context, “Horizon Scanning” (analogous to early warning radar) is defined here as the process of systematically exploring the external environment (in this case, the scientific literature) in an effort to detect emerging trends ([17]); “Quantitative Horizon Scanning” (QHS) refers to the use of statistical