Assessing Interdisciplinary Research Within an Emerging Technology Network: A Novel Approach Based on Patents in the Field of Bioplastics

Interdisciplinary research is an increasingly crucial source of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, or bioplastics with the potential to alleviate the grand challenges of the 21st century. Nonetheless, assessing the degree of interdisciplinary research and resulting emerging technology networks remains somewhat ambiguous, as integrating and recombining knowledge from distant domains is a complex phenomenon. By drawing upon patents, patent citations, and their technology classification, this article seeks to elucidate how interdisciplinary research can be assessed, monitored, and visualized by taking technological knowledge areas as the unit of analysis. For our novel approach, we employ the case of bioplastics as an example of an emerging technology within the highly interdisciplinary Bioeconomy. We demonstrate, inter alia, how the importance of interdisciplinarity across technological knowledge areas has increased over time in the case of bioplastics, how different technological knowledge areas link up to form an emerging technology network, and, more generally, how this novel approach can help scientific and industrial actors to guide and plan their interdisciplinary research in emerging technologies. With regard to policy-makers, our novel operationalization of interdisciplinarity provides guidance for developing and monitoring the impact of science and innovation policies that are able to foster interdisciplinary research and emerging technologies.