[Purpose/Significance] Identifying potential technological opportunities will help countries and enterprises seize scientific and technological opportunities, which is particularly important for innovation entities to enhance their core competitiveness and gain competitive advantages in scientific and technological innovation and application. A systematic review of existing research is provided on technology opportunity identification, discriminating current limitations and research prospects to provide theoretical support for further research and practice on technology opportunity identification. [Method/Process] This paper first clarifies the connotation and types of technology opportunities, and the research holds that technology opportunities can be divided into three types: emerging technology, blank technology and fusion technology. It then sorts out the research status of three different types of technology opportunity identification at home and abroad through literature review, and focuses on the summary of the characteristics of different types of technology opportunity identification. It includes the core ideas, main methods, representative literature, and each type of data sources, and evaluates the existing research results. Finally, the limitations of the current research, and the development direction of future are discussed. [Results/Conclusions] Diversified types of technology opportunity identification are found and rich research methods are used in the literature, and a relatively standardized and systematic research paradigm has come into being. By analyzing each type of technology opportunity, some common elements can be found, including representative methods, method principles, data sources, knowledge representation units, technology opportunity definitions, technology opportunity evaluation, advantages and disadvantages, and other characteristics. The main limitations of the existing research are summarized as follows. First, the existing research is primarily carried out from a single perspective view, and a complete system of cross-domain technology identification and reference methods has not yet been formed. Second, in terms of data sources, most of the data sources of technology opportunity identification are papers or patent data, and there is a lack of research on the integration of multi-source data and study on multiple relationships. In terms of identification methods, the representative technology is primarily at a macro or micro level, and the semantic relationship between words is seldom considered. Finally, in terms of post-evaluation, there is a lack of a comprehensive and systematic evaluation system. The possible research work in the future may focus on the following aspects: cross-field and cross-topic technology opportunity identification to achieve cross convergence among more technology elements will become the development trend; more diversified and targeted data sources, research methods, and research content are expected; the analysis framework and process will be more standardized, and the post-evaluation system will be improved.