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There is considerable and growing interest in the emergence of novel technologies, especially from the policy-making perspective. Yet as an area of study, emerging technologies lacks key foundational elements, namely a consensus on what classifies a technology as 'emergent' and strong research designs that operationalize central theoretical concepts. The present paper aims to fill this gap by developing a definition of 'emerging technologies' and linking this conceptual effort with the development of a framework for the operationalisation of technological emergence. The definition is developed by combining a basic understanding of the term and in particular the concept of 'emergence' with a review of key innovation studies dealing with definitional issues of technological emergence. The resulting definition identifies five attributes that feature in the emergence of novel technologies. These are: (i) radical novelty, (ii) relatively fast growth, (iii) coherence, (iv) prominent impact, and (v) uncertainty and ambiguity. The framework for operationalising emerging technologies is then elaborated on the basis of the proposed attributes. To do so, we identify and review major empirical approaches (mainly in, although not limited to, the scientometric domain) for the detection and study of emerging technologies (these include indicators and trend analysis, citation analysis, co-word analysis, overlay mapping, and combinations thereof) and elaborate on how these can be used to operationalise the different attributes of emergence.

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This article examines the origins and evolution of the field of science policy and innovation studies (SPIS). In particular, it seeks to identify the key intellectual developments in the field over the last 50 years by analysing the publications that have been highly cited by other researchers. Along with other studies reported in this Special issue, it represents one of the first and most systematic attempts to identify and analyse the most influential contributions to an emerging field on the basis of highly cited books and articles. The analysis reveals how the emerging field of SPIS drew upon a growing range of disciplines in the late 1950s and 1960s, and how the relationship with these disciplines evolved over time. Around the mid-1980s, SPIS started to become a more coherent field centred on the adoption of an evolutionary (or neo-Schumpeterian) economics framework, and an interactive model of the innovation process, and (a little later) the concept of 'systems of innovation' and the resource-based view of the firm. The article concludes with a discussion of whether SPIS is perhaps in the early stages of becoming a discipline.