Value of Patent Information and Analysis ______________________________ 23

The patent specification is the source of the patent information, and the general patent specification contains the text of the patent bibliographic and the patent specification. The patent bibliographic information includes Title, Abstract, Patent Number, Issue Date, Application Number/Date, Inventor, Assignee, Agent, International Patent Classification (IPC), the United States Patent Classification (UPC),

which the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) also provides the specific State/County, Foreign references, Other references, such as journals, …etc, Primary Examiner, Assistant Examiner, and so on.

The text of the patent specification is a detailed description and comprised of the background, purpose, efficacy, illustrations and claims. The purpose and efficacy is to describe the summary of the invention and highlight its benefits. The illustrations are used to clearly illustrate the features of the invention to make the readers quickly understand the contents, and the claims is a description of this invention’s scope of the patent specification, a basis of determining the infringement and the size of the exclusive rights.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) survey, 90 to 95% of the annual world’s inventions can be found in the patent specification, while other technical literatures only record 5 to10%. WIPO also points out that if the patent information could be made good use of, the time of R&D could be shortened around 60% and the research funding could be save up to 40%. As a result, it is extremely important and indispensable to read and analyze the patent specification and obtain the valuable technical information. Otherwise, a lot of latest technical information and precious business value intelligence will be missed.

In accordance with Hall (1986), the patent analysis is the conversion of patent data

into more useful patent information. It is an effective tool not only for R&D planning and intellectual properties management, but also as a basis for technical competition analysis, technical trend analysis, and scope determination (Hall, 1986).

Ashton and Sen (1988) also states that patent analysis can understand the technical trend and the competitors’ position in the patent market and lists five primary application field, as Table 3 below.

Table 3: The Practical Application Field of Patent Trend Analysis

Application field Enterprise Planning Application

Technology competitive analysis

• Compare the patent position and strategy of the companies

• Characterize the high-growth and low-growth technology of the competitors

New joint venture assessment

• Evaluate the possible technology M&A

• Analyze the possibility of joint venture

Patent Portfolio Management

• Identify valuable patents, product areas or by-products

• Identify potential technical customers

R&D management • Analyze process/product plan

• Define pacing technology

Product area monitoring

• Examine the patent content and ownership

• Check the possibility of infringement

Source：Ashton, and Sen, (1988)

Moreover, Mogee (1991) thinks the patent analysis should have the following four applications of value:

(一)、 Rival Analysis

In the patent specification, there will have many patent classification number.

Different national patent database will have different classifications, and each patent classification number of letters represents a technical classification. Thus, as long as familiar with patent classification number, you can use patent analysis to find the competing same kind of inventions’ patent application status, which can know the patent application status and the numbers of patents of competitors.

(二)、 Technology Tracking Forecasting

Lock the scope of specific technology, and you can determine whether the technologies are mature or not, have prospects for development, or encounter the bottleneck by the number of patents and investors. Consequently, managers can understand the technical development of the industry to determine whether to invest.

(三)、 Identifying Important Developments

If this patent is the most critical and important core technology, it will be cited by all the relevant inventors, which identifies the important developments.

(四)、 International Strategic Analysis

With the national patent database, you can know worldwide patent applications of

the specific company, because the patent is based on the territorial principle, which can assess the company’s international strategy.

From Hall (1986), Ashton and Sen (1988), and Mogee (1991), and many other scholars all have clearly pointed out the patent analysis can bring value to the enterprise, and is beneficial to the strategy development, research and development, intellectual properties management and trend identification.

2.2.2 Patent Trend Analysis

Patent analysis has been applied to many different fields, and analyzed a variety of topics with different research method. Some research papers analyzed certain industry or technology to provide suggestions of patent portfolios and R&D strategies respectively (Wu et al, 2015). Other researches used patent analysis to provide the technology matching method, or investment projects’ evaluations (Altuntas & Dereli, 2014). In addition, many other researches discussed industrial development and technology trend by patent analysis (Yoon & Park, 2003).

Patent analysis has been applied in different fields. Some apply to analyze the trend of certain technologies (Choi & Jun, 2014), and others apply patent analysis to discover emerging technologies (S. Altuntas et al, 2015), which are summarized in Table 4 below.

Due to patent data contains a lot of valuable information, and the trend might

be hidden within the texts, and only a few researches analyze Fintech patent, this study chooses to use Fintech patent data as data subject to analyze the hidden and potential trend of Fintech.

Table 4: The Summarized Literature Applications of Patent Trend Analysis

Year Author Literature field

2003 Yoon Byungun, & Park Yongtae

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-related technology 2006 Daim, T., Rueda, G.,

Martin, H., & Gerdsri, P.

Fuel cell, food safety, and optical storage technologies

2009 Lee, S., Yoon, B., Lee,

C., & Park, J RFID-related technology 2011 Lee, C., Jeon, J., & Park,

Y. Laser technology

2012 Kim et al. Gartner’s emerging technologies

2014 Seongyong Choi &

Sunghae Jun

Humanoid robot system (HBS) technology

2015 Serkan Altuntas et al.

Thin film transistor-liquid crystal display, flash memory system, and personal digital assistant

Source：Summarized by this study

2.3 Text Mining

This section contains about two parts. First part talks about the basic definitions and related research areas of text mining, and the other part reviews the literatures that combine text mining analysis and patent analysis to analyze the trends.

In the past times, the transmission of terms let the later generations understand the past incidents and the intelligence of the ancestors. Right now we are in the era of information explosion, the access and transmission of the information become much easier and generate a lot of data. If we can analyze the large amount of data with some techniques to mine the hidden information or message behind the terms, we can apply this knowledge to organize new information as a reference for future research or industry reference source (Feldman & Dagan, 1995).