For years now quantative models have been used around the globe to predict stock market movements however with advances in Indexing technologies could these techniques now be used to predict Innovations?

 Even though Technology Innovations seem to be radical, usually they are either incremental changes to existing products or actually based on previous ideas.  If we look to science fiction films for example you can see many products that now exist.  

If we consider two, “Star Trek” and “Back to the Future” there are many products which are the forerunners of products we use every day.

The Star Trek Communicator could be a mobile phone, the sliding doors were a fantasy.

More recently Nike released shoes based on Marty Mcfly’s from the film  

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/nike-releases-famed-back-to-the-future-shoe-20110909-1k0j0.html

And of course these items are only the tip of the iceberg. 

There are now tools which can look at the meta data from films using Deep Video Indexing (VDI) so how long will it be before we can map the time line of science fiction to science fact and predict the next Innovations.