‘Domain-specific’ patent analytics: Focus on company's technology priorities

This paper aims to depict a new usage of patent analytics on a corporate level mitigating the gap between strategy (technology policy making) and operational activities (R&D program development and actualisation).The approach proposed for such mitigation is based on three techniques enriching patent analytics practical implementation:1) knowledge modelling techniques;2) deep technical analysis based on knowledge model;3) ‘insight-driven analytics’ approach.Such three techniques aim to facilitate the implementation of PL in the company's technology management processes.The paper contains examples related to oil & gas, transport, and water treatment industries.     

The future of patent information––a user with a view

The future of patent information is considered from the combined perspective of an information specialist, a patent agent, an inventor and a corporate patent information user. A brief overview of current patenting trends is highlighted, followed by a close look at future trends in the patent information field, including changes in the delivery, analysis and management of patent information, and in the role of intermediaries. A few examples are provided in support of forward-looking statements to illustrate the challenging dynamics involved in this field. Finally, a long-term view is considered, which indicates there remains much need for improvement.     

Measuring patent quality: A claim and search report approach

This paper presents a new prospective metric for assessing the novelty and inventiveness of patents. It does this by using initial patent search reports and examiner's intuition about the impact of adverse citations on patent claim survival. The paper then demonstrates the metric by evaluating the quality of Switzerland's national patent stock using a selection model, finding that between 84 and 90% of the country's national patents would likely not survive examination at the European Patent Office. In doing so, it contributes to the larger literature on patent assessment, underscores the relevance of patent strategy in the observed characteristics of patents, and removes some of the ambiguity in the academic literature about backward citations.     

The patent activities of Korea and Taiwan: a comparative case study of patent statistics

This paper examines the patent grant rate of Korea and Taiwan by using the country-level patent statistics of Korea, Taiwan and USA during the period of 1988–1998. The patent grant rate means the rate of US patent grants to the applications filed in USA during the investigated years. To measure the grant rate, a model was developed for the methodological procedure. In the framework of the model, the process of patent dynamics in these countries shows different patterns. The financial crisis of Korea in 1998–1999 influenced the number of domestic patent applications by Koreans, resulting in the rapid decrease. The US patent application rate by Koreans, however, was not affected, keeping the average rate of applications at 7.5% of the Korean applications during the investigated period. The rate of US patent grants by Koreans in the early 1990s dropped, which can be explained by the change of patent strategy of Samsung Elec. Co. Ltd.Taiwan, on the other hand, had filed 160% more US patent applications than its own domestic applications. The authors suggest that this is attributable to some US patent applications corresponding to Taiwanese domestic applications for utility models, and that this may be a factor in the lower rate of Taiwanese US patent grants (average 53.4%) than that of Koreans (average 66.3%). The rate of US patent grants by Taiwanese has constantly increased, while that for Koreans has fluctuated; the authors conjecture that this implies that Taiwanese patent management for the US patents has improved.     

The prevalence of weak patents in the United States: A new method to identify weak patents and the implications for patent policy

The presence of patents with dubious validity (i.e., weak patents) has been one of the prominent patent policy issues with undesirable consequences in innovation. The present study empirically examines the prevalence of weak patents in the United States and whether or not the current patent system is capable of correcting weak patent issues. To this end, we propose a new method to identify weak patents by using patent citation information in conjunction with the textual similarity between citing and cited patents. Our method, along with a series of internal validation measures, shows that 13% of U.S. patents filed from 2001 to 2010 are weak patents. By applying this new method, we find that patent owners build a patent portfolio around a weak patent by developing subsequent inventions more than they do for a non-weak patent. Our further analysis finds that a weak patent is more or equally likely to be retained by the patent owner than a non-weak patent. Our findings suggest that patent owners have an incentive to invest in maintaining and appropriating weak patents, and thus, the current patent system is incapable of self-correcting weak patent issues.     

Impacts of patent information on clustering in Derwent Innovation's ThemeScape map

ThemeScape Map (Clarivate Analytics, n.d.) is a data analytics tool provided by Derwent Innovation. It is used by patent researchers and R&D experts to generate quick patent intelligence (HG Insights, 2020). It is a general practice that users plot the map by using the default settings recommended by Derwent Innovation, but this default setting may not yield the most optimized results as desired. In this paper, the author contributes to the empirical study on the impacts of the combination of the different types of patent information to be used in ThemeScape Map when clustering patent data. As a result, this paper recommends patent analysts to include Patent Classification and DWPI data when plotting ThemeScape Map in order to achieve more optimized results.     

Patent data mining in fisheries sector: An analysis using Questel-Orbit and Espacenet

The advent of an enormous amount of patent data in various patent databases and patinformatics tools to analyze this data have led to an easy access to information for studying the technological trends and R&D activities in a sector. The fisheries sector is driven by the demand and profit generated and there are some unforeseen trends exhibited at different phases of development in specialized areas related to fisheries. In this study we have retrieved patent data of seven technology domains in fisheries, such as Fish, Fish Culture (FC), Fishing Technology (FT), Fish Processing and Products (FPP), Fish Health and Nutrition (FHN), Fish Genetics (FG) and Fish Rearing (FR) during 2000–2015. The legal status of patents, top priority countries and top assignees in different fields of the fisheries sector were analyzed. The results were compared with various developmental trends, indicating a clear relation to industrial ups and downs, the emergence of more patent portfolios in countries coping with latest technology trends and the improper litigation of legal status of the patents filed in the fisheries sector. Patent analysis in a specialized sector could be used as a potential tool in global policy debates, where fish as a natural resource is over-exploited without realizing its real potential.     

A new patent processing suite for academic and research purposes

Patent databases are a counterpart of a technical encyclopedia providing a valuable informational source from patent documents. Patents apply to a wide variety of uses, and this is expanding. The increasing kinds of users of patent documents result in a lack of educational programs regarding this matter. This paper describes Patent2Net (P2N) a patentinformatic suite whose purpose is to fill the lack in the academic world (education and research) of a tool to use with students (STEM, Masters, PhD), by valuation services and for defining corpuses for research in general patent analysis, specifically on textual content. P2N is a free open-source modular, scalable, customizable and derivable tool, written in the python language. We present here the main functions of the tool and the technical aspects after discussing the skills to be reached by students for state of the art patent analysis.     

Patent text modeling strategy and its classification based on structural features

To find the optimal combination of text modeling for rapid and accurate classification of patent texts and solve the severe problem of manual classification of patent texts in the face of massive patent scientific and technological information. In order to improve the efficiency of patent text automatic classification, the patent texts are split and spliced into 15 different modeling combinations based on the content structure of patent text. Through the 360 comparative experiments, the optimal modeling combination of patent text classification under different classification levels is obtained. The experimental results show that the use of full-text content is not always the best modeling choice in patent classification task. The modeling combination of title, abstract and specification (TAD) is more suitable for patent text classification task. In the subclass level, the highest classification accuracy can be obtained by selecting the specification (d) of patent text. The patent text modeling strategy proposed in this paper provides a good support for improving the effect of patent text classification.     

How SMEs can benefit from supply chain partnerships

In recent literature on supply chain partnerships in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), there is controversy regarding the benefits of these partnerships. To resolve this controversy, specific information is needed on the implementation of these partnerships by SMEs; an area, that, thus far, has received little academic attention. In this paper, we examine different business functions (production, marketing and sales, purchasing and logistics, research and development (R&D) and finance) within a supply chain partnership. We collected data for each individual function from 279 high-tech SMEs and examined the relationship between the specific types of partnerships and the overall performance of the SMEs. The results indicate that it is only in the area of R&D that partnerships have a significant positive effect on overall firm performance. The results imply that SMEs primarily can benefit from particular types of supply chain partnerships, i.e. R&D partnerships. The results contribute to the debate in the literature by explaining why many SMEs were found not to benefit from these partnerships. We also provide implications for firms and how SMEs can better utilise supply chain management (SCM).     

Who influences USPTO patent examiners?

We test for evidence that the patent attorney has an extra-ordinary influence on the patent examiner using data on examiner citations of 93 608 patent applications to the USPTO. We find that examiners cite patents from the same patent attorney (as used for the focal application) at an abnormally high rate. This evidence is consistent with the view that attorneys are influencing the examiners reports. Coupled with new evidence that non-blocking examiner citations have a positive effect on the grant decision, this suggest that the grant decision may be compromised.     

Legal Validity Metrics for Patent Offices and Law Firms – Recycling of Patent Court Appeal Decisions for Quality Management

In all relevant patent systems an adversely affected party has the possibility to appeal the patent office's decision in front of a patent court or Board of Appeal (BoA). Within a European context, the EPO is, in a way, even engaging in de facto competition with national patent offices. As an example, the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) provides quasi identical patent products and offers the same kind of legal recourse to the German patent court (BPatGer) for these products. Both offices offer an opposition procedure which is open for appeal, and also in the case of a refusal, both offices offer the possibility of appeals. Thus, the EPO Boards of Appeal are engaged in making decisions every year on around 2000 cases and, e.g., the BPatGer on 600 cases regarding the legal validity of the first instance's work. It is thus remarkable that, so far, nobody has systematically included the work of the patent courts in a statistical legal validity evaluation in the context of the Patent & Trademark Offices' (PTOs') quality assurance systems.Since there is obviously a need to establish a common standard for the comparison of first and second instance legal teachings in patent law, a methodology for comparative legal validity analysis is proposed in this paper. I have tested and optimised the approach while working as a project manager at the European Patent Office, based on analysis of 2300 appeal decisions from seven annual batches.     

黑龙江省生物医药产业专利战略研究

生物制药业因其高投入、高风险、高回报的产业特点,对技术的依赖性很强,发达国家的生物制药业因大量的技术支持和成熟的专利战略的运用取得了巨大成功。黑龙江省生物制药业应以国家和企业的专利战略为重点,以行业专利战略为主线,建立知识产权联盟,切实实施好保护模仿创新、建立技术标准、利用国际公约等战略战术,促进该行业的长发展。     

Deep learning based pipeline with multichannel inputs for patent classification

This work introduces a deep learning pipeline for automatic patent classification with multichannel inputs based on LSTM and word vector embeddings. Sophisticated text mining methods are used to extract the most important segments from patent texts, and a domain-specific pre-trained word embeddings model for the patent domain is developed; it was trained on a very large dataset of more than five million patents. The deep learning pipeline is using multiple parallel LSTM networks that read the source patent document using different input dimensions namely embeddings of different segments of patent texts, and sparse linear input of different metadata. Classifying patents into corresponding technical fields is selected as a use case. In this use case, a series of patent classification experiments are conducted on different patent datasets, and the experimental results indicate that using the segments of patent texts as well as the metadata as multichannel inputs for a deep neural network model, achieves better performance than one input channel.     

Academic response to the European Commission’s Questionnaire on the patent system in Europe: An economic approach

This paper presents an economic opinion on the questionnaire on the European patent system that was recently issued by the European Commission. We argue that the debate on patent reform in Europe needs to be more focused on its economic purpose, namely the promotion of innovation. As a first step we unfold sub-issues and trade-offs underlying the general and consensual goal which “promoting innovation” is. We contrast the protection and diffusion functions of the patent system, both of which must be taken into account in order to create an original European patent regime geared towards innovation. We also emphasize the possibility for the European patent system to answer more specific needs, such as those of small and medium enterprises or those of industries with highly cumulative innovations. We discuss as the second step the capacity of the European patent system to achieve these policy goals through various levers. We especially argue that patent fees or translation requirements should be viewed as policy instruments rather than as in a purely budgetary perspective. We moreover consider the positive or negative consequences one can expect from the coexistence of different patent systems in Europe.     

Design Patent Map: An Innovative Measure for Corporative Design Strategies

Abstract:

The design patent map is one of the essential strategic measures for formulating design strategies. Because the design patent is considered less definite than other patent categories, it is relatively difficult to create a design patent map. No study has been discovered in a worldwide search of patent documents or publications that is relevant to design patent maps, proving the innovative nature of this study. The authors have extracted 96 representative works for bicycle frame design patents that were published from 1992 to 2003 and have used them as the study samples. To ensure precise interpretation of the technical data of bicycle frames and to create the design patent map, the authors have interviewed 11 design patent examiners who have an average of 10 years of experience in patent examination, and are currently working in the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office. Based on the matrix for the available patenting capability and the degree of need for patents, the authors have further converted the design patent map into nine feasibly specific design strategies: (1) overall seizure, (2) expansion, (3) closing-in, (4) envelopment, (5) dispersion, (6) pincer attack, (7) division, (8) deviation, and (9) abandonment. As a result, enterprises will be able to employ the design patent map developed in this study to customize their own design strategies. Such a strategic measure will soon become a new competitive edge for enterprises with the arrival of the knowledge economy era.     

Searching the Patent Space

The Patent Space is a model to explain different kinds of patent searches in an illustrative and comprehensible way to laymen in the field of patents and patent searches, e.g. to customers like R + D staff or members of the Board. The most important kinds of patent searches are shown as examples of the applications of the ‘Patent Space’ concept.     

A Systemic Approach to Exploring an Essential Patent Linking Standard and Patent Maps: Application of Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM)

Abstract:

As the intense competition for the international standardization of technology has increased, many companies are concentrating their capabilities on securing essential patents that claim one or more inventions required to practice a given industry standard; however, despite the importance of developing essential patents, the approaches to exploring promising essential patent: have some limitations in terms of methodology and data. As a remedy, this article proposes a method that derives an essential patent through Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM)-based standard and patent maps. The suggested approach involves a systematic process that identifies vacuums on a standard map in a specific technology field and enables analysts to find candidate for promising essential patents instead of relying on the experts. By applying the proposed methodology, this research discovered the vacuums in an industrial standard document about fuel cell technology as well as the candidates of essential patents in this technology field.     

Impact of visual performance management systems on the performance management practices of organisations

The purpose of this paper was to explore how visual strategy and performance management techniques impact performance measurement and management practices of organisations. A novel visual performance management approach is developed and implemented in qualitative case studies with seven manufacturing SMEs across Europe. The implementation cases demonstrate that visual management systems serve to support ongoing strategy development and implementation, facilitate performance measurement and review, enable people engagement, improve internal and external communication, enhance collaboration and integration, support the development of a continuous improvement culture and foster innovation. Additional explorative and longitudinal research is required to understand the long-term impact of such approaches in both small and larger organisations.