Innovation-driven development worldwide is driving scientific and technological (Sci-Tech) progress. As an important form of Sci-Tech achievements, patents provide effective protection and transformation opportunities for Sci-Tech innovations; this includes using and exchanging of patents to realize their value. However, realizing patent value involves some challenges: (1) discovering the transformation opportunities and (2) determining the conditions needed to realize patent transformation. To solve these challenges, we introduce a heterogeneous network-based transformation prediction model to discover transformation opportunities and explain the transformation conditions. The model includes: (1) construction of a heterogeneous network, (2) a heterogeneous network-based transformation opportunity prediction method, and (3) a heterogeneous network-based transformation conditions explainable method. The results obtained show that the proposed model can discover transformation opportunities with high evaluation measurements and explainable transformation conditions. •The heterogeneous network based transformation opportunity prediction method discovers the transformation opportunities.•The heterogeneous network based transformation condition explainable method explains what transformation conditions are needed to realize the transformation.