Using take-off phase data for forecasting the evolution of emergent technologies

This study tries to forecast the evolution of five emerging technologies, namely 3d printing, unmanned aerial vehicles (drone), blockchain technology, natural language processing (NPL) and virtual reality (VR) by comparing the evolution in patent number of these technologies (they are all at take-off phase at year 2016) with the pattern shown by a set of mature technologies on that same phase. After matching the emerging and mature technologies, we use S-curve models to predict both the maturity time and the expected total patent number an emerging technology will achieve in its maturity. The results predict that 3d printing and blockchain technologies will be the first to achieve the maturity on the first half of 2030 decade, while the rest of technologies will arrive to that point on the second half of 2040. We finish by discussing the shortcomings of our approach and setting some future improvement lines.