International Patent Classification Codes Research Articles

Patenting trends in the pharmaceutical field of Mexican universities.

Aim: pharmaceutical patenting activity in developing countries, including Mexico, is unknown. Objective: determine the activity of pharmaceutical patents by Mexican universities. Method: using 'university' as keyword and A61K, A61P and C07 as International Patent Classification codes, was searched to generate a perspective of pharmaceutical patent applications by Mexican universities. Results: 227 patents (186 granted patents + 41 not-granted patents) were claimed in the period 2000-2018. The leading university was the National Autonomous University of Mexico, followed by the Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo León, and Universidad Autonoma de Puebla. The pharmaceutical concerns addressed were led by the fields of infectious, cancer and diabetes. Conclusion: in Mexican universities, the licensing of pharmaceutical patents is still in its early stages.

PEMT: a patent enrichment tool for drug discovery.

Drug discovery practitioners in industry and academia use semantic tools to extract information from online scientific literature to generate new insights into targets, therapeutics and diseases. However, due to complexities in access and analysis, patent-based literature is often overlooked as a source of information. As drug discovery is a highly competitive field, naturally, tools that tap into patent literature can provide any actor in the field an advantage in terms of better informed decision-making. Hence, we aim to facilitate access to patent literature through the creation of an automatic tool for extracting information from patents described in existing public resources. Here, we present PEMT, a novel patent enrichment tool, that takes advantage of public databases like ChEMBL and SureChEMBL to extract relevant patent information linked to chemical structures and/or gene names described through FAIR principles and metadata annotations. PEMT aims at supporting drug discovery and research by establishing a patent landscape around genes of interest. The pharmaceutical focus of the tool is mainly due to the subselection of International Patent Classification codes, but in principle, it can be used for other patent fields, provided that a link between a concept and chemical structure is investigated. Finally, we demonstrate a use-case in rare diseases by generating a gene-patent list based on the epidemiological prevalence of these diseases and exploring their underlying patent landscapes. PEMT is an open-source Python tool and its source code and PyPi package are available at https://github.com/Fraunhofer-ITMP/PEMT and https://pypi.org/project/PEMT/, respectively. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Role and challenge of technology toward a smart sustainable city: Topic modeling, classification, and time series analysis using information and communication technology patent data

This research defines and classifies essential technology groups that comprise a smart sustainable city (SSC) and explores patterns of technological growth by analyzing patents. First, topic modeling and network analysis are conducted using patent text data and international patent classification code, respectively. Patents are classified and defined based on the technology theme and the type of technology provider. Second, hardware-oriented and service application-oriented technologies are classified and predicted using machine learning. Third, the similarities in growth patterns of different technology groups are explored using dynamic time warping (DTW). Moreover, lagging or preceding relationships are examined using multivariate time series analysis. Network infrastructure and Internet-of-things (IoT) application technologies have short-term lagging and preceding relationships along with long-term equilibrium relationships. In terms of player groups, long-term relationships between device vendors, chipset makers, network operator and IoT service provider, and network equipment vendors are confirmed. Technologies for realizing a sustainable city must be prioritized, and the strategic direction of technology must be established to realize truly smart sustainable cities. The supplier of technologies along with possible collaboration opportunities must also be selected. This study proposes the role and direction of technology for SSC and presents a comprehensive methodology for analyzing technology using patents.

Brazilian green patents

he objective of the research reported here is to ascertain what variables influence the behavior of the patents that receive the most citations. The literature recognizes the number of forward citations as one of the most important indicators for discovering an invention’s value. This claim is tested in a research population consisting of the set of Brazilian green patents registered in the Global Patent Index database. The following variables are used: applicant type, applicant country, number of inventors, International Patent Classification code, family size, renewals, Patent Cooperation Treaty applicability, triadic family, grant and number of citations. These variables are used to create a decision tree and a logistic regression with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, V.21, and MS Excel. The results show that, in the behavior of Brazilian green patents, family size and renewals are connected to the mostcited patents. Another significant variable, but one whose numbers were not significant enough to place it in the decision tree, was membership in the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

Augmenting keyword-based patent prior art search using weighted classification code hierarchies

Patents are critical intellectual assets for any business. With the rapid increase in the patent filings, patent prior art retrieval has become an important task. The goal of the prior art retrieval is to find documents relevant to a patent application. Due to the special nature of the patent documents, only relying on keyword-based queries does not prove effective in patent retrieval. Previous works have used international patent classification (IPC) to improve the effectiveness of keyword-based search. However, these systems have used two-stage retrieval process using IPC mostly to filter patent documents or to re-rank the documents retrieved by keyword-based query. In the approach proposed in this paper, weighted IPC code hierarchies have been explored to augment keyword-based search, thereby eliminating the use of an additional processing step. Experiments on the CLEF-IP 2011 benchmark dataset show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline on the MAP, recall and PRES.

Camellia sinensis in Dentistry: Technological Prospection and Scientific Evidence.

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate reports of patents for oral care formulations, based on Camellia sinensis (C. sinensis), deposited and granted in intellectual property banks. Methods A survey was conducted through collection, treatment, and analysis of extracted information from patent reports selected. The documentary research was conducted in January 2021 on formulations with C. sinensis for dental applications, including since the first patent deposits until the current time. The risk of bias of clinical trials with these formulations was analyzed to verify the scientific evidence. The data extracted represent the distribution of the number of patents by banks, annual evolution of patent deposits, applicant of patents by country, distribution of patents according to International Patent Classification codes, and the types of patented products. Results Data and information from 20 selected patents were extracted. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) were the banks with the largest number of patents for products/formulations with C. sinensis for oral care applications with 7 (35%) and 6 (30%) patent registrations, respectively. Other banks did not provide patents related to the search. Patents of compositions were the largest with 14 filings, and the remainder of formulations are represented specially by mouthwashes and toothpastes. As for clinical application, 18 patents were filed as products with antimicrobial and antibiofilm action, while 2 patents are directed to the treatment of xerostomia. In general, the aspects of the studies of clinical efficacy pointed to a low risk of bias. Conclusion The study pointed out a small number of products protected by patents for Camellia sinensis for oral care indication, highlighting mainly mouthwash compositions and formulations. In the methodological parameters of clinical trials carried out with the formulations, the majority pointed out a low risk of bias.

Recommending blue ocean technologies for subcontractors: A framework based on business reports of prime contractors and patents.

Subcontractors depend heavily on their prime contractor and thus find it very risky to enter a new business on their own. This study proposes a framework for these subcontractors to develop blue ocean technologies related to their prime contractor. First, the primary technologies predicted to be promising are extracted from the business reports of the prime contractor. Sub-technologies are then selected through a patent-based search using keywords and International Patent Classification codes of the primary technologies. From them, blue ocean technologies are proposed by optimizing the weighted mean of the min-max normalized market value, degree of competition in the technology market, and subcontractors’ potential technological capabilities for each sub-technology. This study shows that subcontractors can enhance their technology competitiveness by finding a low-risk blue ocean technology. Our empirical research on the subcontractors of a semiconductor firm identified technological patent fields for them to pursue. From our framework, subcontractors can identify blue ocean technologies by considering their prime contractor’s future industrial areas and technologies of interest as well as their own technological capabilities. Furthermore, the prime contractors can gain the synergy effect of technology expansion through cooperation.

Technological Advances to Reduce Apis mellifera Mortality: A Bibliometric Analysis

Bees play a fundamental role in the ecological balance of ecosystems, due to the pollination process they carry out on crops, including the production of honey. However, the mortality of bees is a significant concern; bee mortality can occur for several reasons, such as pesticides, mites, viruses, climate change, pathogens and a reduction in food resources and nests. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most widely used bee for commercial pollination and honey production. Therefore, the main objective is to compare the development of patent families and article publications related to the reduction in A. meliífera mortality. Data on patent families were collected on the Orbit platform, while data on scientific articles were collected on the Scopus database, with a time interval of 1980–2019. Subsequently, the data were analyzed in order to show the main priority countries, main assignees, and main IPC (International Patent Classification) codes, an analysis of the technology life cycle and the correlation between the data of patent families and articles published. The technologies that help to decrease bee mortality showed a technological maturity rate of 27.15% for patent families data and 53.35% for data from articles published in journals. It was noticed that the principal interest regarding the reduction in A. mellifera mortality is focused on universities, mainly in the United States and China.

The nature of ICT in technology convergence: A knowledge-based network analysis.

This study aims to understand the nature of information and communication technology in technology convergence. We form a knowledge network by applying social network theories to Korean patent data collected from the European Patent Organization. A knowledge network consists of nodes representing technology sectors identified by their International Patent Classification codes and edges that link International Patent Classification codes when they appear concurrently in a patent. We test the proposed hypotheses using four indices (degree centrality, E-I index, entropy index, and clustering coefficient). The results show that information and communication technology is easily attached but tends to converge with similar technology and has the greatest influence on technology convergence over other technologies. This study is expected to help practitioners and policymakers understand the structure and interaction mechanisms of technology from a systematic perspective and improve national-level technology policies.

Patent data based search framework for IT R&D employees for convergence technology

As technology convergence is attracting increasing attention, many companies pay attention to human resources planning for the convergence R&D. This study proposes a patent-based R&D employee search framework for the firms planning to develop convergence technologies. We apply this framework to an automobile company searching patent inventors in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field, reflecting the future convergence trends in self-driving vehicles. ICT patent inventors were evaluated based on their ICT patents scored in three steps. First, the importance of the ICT areas they cover is considered in terms of International Patent Classification code by taking into account the converge potential with the focal firm’s technologies in the future. Second, the feasibility of convergence with the ICT technologies that the focal firm wants to cover is assessed. Finally, various inherent values of ICT patent are considered. The proposed framework is expected to improve the efficiency of the process of spotting candidates for convergence R&D.

Prospective Study of Microbial Colorants under the Focus of Patent Documents.

Colorant-producing microorganisms are quite common in nature. These biomolecules present many biological activities such as antitumoral, antimicrobial and antioxidant, in addition to the various nuances of color, making them of special technological importance to the industrial sectors. This study aims to conduct a technological mapping in the patent, at European patent Office (EPO), in order to evaluate the global panorama of the use of microbial colorants. The experimental design was acquired by the keyword-driven approach through the advanced search in the Espacenet database European Patent Office (EPO). The keywords selected were bacteria or fungi* or yeast or algae or microorganism* but not plant* and pigment* or color* or colorant* or dye* and the International Patent Classification code, C09B61, for prospecting of interest. There has been a linear increase in patents developed in the last 20 years, with Japan as the largest depositor in the area. The companies Dainippon Ink and Chemicals and Ajinomoto, both being Japanese, are the largest depositors with 20% of all patents. Among the microorganisms, the filamentous fungi appeared in the first place with 32% of documents and the fungi of the genus Monascus were the most frequently used. The use of microbial colorants has been growing among industries, mainly in food sectors, due to the growing demand for products of natural origin. Thus, the increase in research and technological development in the area of microbial colorants can become an economically viable and promising strategy for the various industrial sectors.

Dataset on technological alliances by using joint patents in the biotechnology industry.

The data in this article includes biotechnological joint patents as a proxy of technological alliances. Joint patents are not directly found in public or commercial databases. Each joint patent has their corresponding International Patent Classification codes, their forward citation measure as an indicator of innovation value, and the firms involved in the process. The data was collected during a time frame that ranges from 2006 to 2010. Data from the joint biotechnological patents was collected at first during the time window, and then filtered, cleaned, and sampled accordingly to obtain 340 joint patents between firms (e.g. alliances) in the industry. Then each of the joint patents was processed to find the forward citations they have. Data on joint patents of biotechnology industry can be reused in future studies related to technological alliances and patenting mechanisms and process.

Evolution of World and Brazilian Markets for Enzymes Produced by Solid-state Fermentation: A Patent Analysis.

The use of enzymes in various industrial processes has become increasingly frequent. When added to productive processes, it can accelerate reactions and generate a number of new products. The solid state fermentation (SSF), among other applications, has been employed also to obtain enzymes. The purpose of this prospection was to map registered patent documents about enzymes production by this type of fermentation in the world, identify the most obtained enzymes with patent documents and compilate information about the world and Brazilian enzyme markets. The experimental design was carried out by the keyword-driven scope through the advanced search in the Espacenet database European Patent Office (EPO). The keywords selected were solid-state fermentation and the International Patent Classification code, C12N9 (enzymes; proenzymes), for prospecting of interest. In 2012, there was the higher number of registered patents (12). China holds 84% of deposited patents. Among the types of depositors, 54% of the selected patent documents were deposited by universities and institutes, and 44% by companies. 76.5% of the evaluated patents used fungi as enzyme producer. Analyzing the enzymes obtained in the registered patents, it is verified that the majority belongs to the group of carbohydrases with 43%, followed by proteases (25%), which are also the two classes of enzymes most commercialized in the market. China holds the majority of the registered patents but North America gets the largest global enzyme market revenue followed by Europe and Pacific Asia. Carbohydrases were the most commercialized enzymes and with the highest number of patents registered. Among the carbohydrases, cellulases, xylanases and amylases are the most frequent in patent registration while being fungi produced.

A Study on Dynamic Patterns of Technology Convergence with IPC Co-Occurrence-Based Analysis: The Case of 3D Printing

Technology convergence has become a typical characteristic of innovation, which affects the evolution of industrial structures and the core competitiveness of organizations. However, the existing research has mainly focused on the development of core areas of convergence, ignoring the potential breakthroughs that emerging peripheral convergence may bring. Therefore, this research put forward a comprehensive methodology based on IPC (International Patent Classification) co-occurrence analysis to study the dynamic patterns of technology convergence from the perspectives of reinforcing convergence and novel convergence. For the former, convergence trends in each period were explored by using association rules, and the convergence degree was measured based on the number of patents containing different IPC codes. Then, the corresponding core technical fields were identified by using information entropy. For the latter, a community detection algorithm based on IPC co-occurrence network was adopted to investigate the convergence trend by period, and important technology fields were identified by the centrality indicators. The methodology proposed in this study is beneficial for firms to seize technological opportunities in technology convergence.

Effect of Technical Domains and Patent Structure on Patent Information Retrieval

Patents are critical intellectual assets for any competitive business. With ever increasing patent filings, effective patent prior art search has become an inevitably important task in patent retrieval which is a subfield of information retrieval (IR). The goal of the prior art search is to find and rank documents related to a query patent. Query formulation is a key step in prior art search in which patent structure is exploited to generate queries using various fields available in patent text. As patent encodes multiple technical domains, this work argues that technical domains and patent structure have their combined effect on the effectiveness of patent retrieval. The study uses international patent classification codes (IPC) to categorize query patents in eight technical domains and also explores eighteen different combination of patent fields to generate search queries. A total of 144 extensive retrieval experiments have been carried out using BM25 ranking algorithm. Retrieval performance is evaluated in terms of recall score of top 1000 records. Empirical results support our assumption. A two-way analysis of variance is also conducted to validate the hypotheses. The findings of this work may be helpful for patent information retrieval professionals to develop domain specific patent retrieval systems exploiting the patent structure.

IPC 코드 분석에 의한 '사물인터넷(IoT)' 특허의 기술 융복합 분석

본 연구에서는 국제특허분류(IPC) 코드를 활용하여 사물인터넷 특허 163건의 기술 융복합을 분석하였다. 분석 결과, IPC 코드의 대표적인 주분류-부분류 조합은 G06Q 50/24-G06Q 50/22(6건), H04L 29/02-H04L 12/28(4건), G06F 15/16-G06F 3/048(3건), G06F 15/16-G06F 9/44(3건), G06Q 50/22-G06Q 50/24(3건)이다. 또한 사물인터넷 특허 중 '건강관리(G06Q 50/22)'와 '환자기록 관리(G06Q 50/24)'의 기술 융복합에 의해 '헬스 케어' 사업 분야의 특허 출원이 9건으로 가장 많았다. 사물인터넷 특허의 상호 연결망 분석에 의해 사물인터넷 특허의 핵심 IPC 코드는 G06F 15/16, G06Q 50/22, G06Q 50/24, H04L 12/28임을 확인하였다. In this study, we analysed the technology convergence of Internet of Things(IoT) by International Patent Classification(IPC) code analysis. 163 patent applications in Korea are the subjects of this study. We confirmed that the most representative IPC code combinations between Main and Sub categories are G06Q 50/24-G06Q 50/22(6 cases), H04L 29/02-H04L 12/28(4 cases), G06F 15/16-G06F 3/048(3 cases), G06F 15/16-G06F 9/44(3 cases), and G06Q 50/22-G06Q 50/24(3 cases). The field of Health Care business have been prepared 9 patent applications by technology convergence between 'Health Care(G06Q 50/22)' and 'Patient Record Management(G06Q 50/24)'. Finally we also concluded that the core IPC code are G06F 15/16, G06Q 50/22, G06Q 50/24, and H04L 12/28 by the technology convergence interconnections analysis of IoT patent applications.

실시간 산사태 모니터링 및 탐지기술에 대한 비즈니스 생태계 기반 기술사업화 전략 연구

본 연구는 실시간 산사태 모니터링 및 탐지기술에 대한 기술사업화 전략 수립을 목적으로 수행되었다. 해당 기술의 가치를 극대화하고 성공적인 기술사업화 전략 도출을 위해 정성·정량적 방법을 활용하여 통합적인 분석을 수행하였다. 정성적 방법으로 해당 기술의 비즈니스 생태계를 분석하였고, 정량적 방법으로는 관련 특허를 수집하여 주요 출원인과 핵심기술 간 구조를 가시화하였다. 통합적 분석으로는 정성적 및 정량적 분석 각각의 결과를 비즈니스 생태계 관점에서 통합 표시하여 실시간 산사태 모니터링 및 탐지기술의 세부 생태계 영역과 기술의 발전강도 및 현황을 분석하였다. 분석 결과, 비즈니스 생태계 내 보완 재 영역의 기술이 발전정도가 높고 관련 주체의 수가 가장 많은 것으로 분석되었으며, 이를 토대로 기술사업화 선순환 시스템 구축을 사업화 전략으로 제시하였다. 기술사업화 선순환 시스템 구축을 위한 세부 전략으로 보완자산을 활용한 기술수요자 탐색과 탐색된 기술수요자를 중심으로 한 기술 예고제를 제시하였다. 도출한 사업화 전략을 활용하여 기술 및 시장의 불확실성이 높은 해당 기술의 사업화 성공가능성을 제고함과 동시에 기술공급자와 기술수요자 간의 연계를 강화하여, 장기적으로 지속적인 경제적 성과를 창출할 것으로 기대된다. This study establishes a commercialization strategy for technology that can monitor and detect landslides in real time. An effective commercialization strategy was sought through both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The qualitative analysis considered the business environment in detail, while the quantitative analysis examined technologically strong and weak areas by visualizing the links between IPC (International Patent Classification) code structure and patent applicants. The results from both analyses are considered together, with particular attention paid to the business environment. The resulting integrated analysis comprehensively explores the degree of technological development and the current state of real-time monitoring and detection technology for landslides. The integrated analysis identified complementary assets in the business environment, as there is strong development and many research entities in this area. This suggests positive reinforcement for commercialization with two sub-strategies: (1) exploring demand with complementary assets, and (2) providing technology information for explored demand, which should facilitate successful commercialization. Exploiting this positive reinforcement for technology commercialization could reduce the high uncertainty of the technology and the market, and thus increase the probability of successful commercialization. It is also expected to contribute to long-term success by strengthening collaboration between the supply and demand sides.

Quantifying technology–industry spillover effects based on patent citation network analysis of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies have been fast developing over the past 20years and are expected to generate extensive spillovers into other industry sectors. However, no previous studies have investigated such spillover effects. In this study, we propose the framework of two-mode network analysis to quantify the spillover effects of UAV technology into various industries using patent citation data of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A two-mode matrix consists of rows corresponding to UAV technologies and columns corresponding to beneficiary industries, and the value depicts the spillover probability obtained using International Patent Classification codes and the technology/industry concordance table. The out- and in-degree centralities of the spillover network are used to identify strong spillover-generating UAV technologies and strong spillover-receiving industries, respectively. We observed that the weapon industry received extensive spillover effects during the period 2005–2009. Based on Mann–Kendall tests, the spillover effects of UAV-related software technologies exhibited a consistently upward trend during both the last 10 and 20years. The past significant trend of spillovers can help us to forecast future trends. The proposed quantification method can be readily applied to investigate other specific technology–industry spillover patterns.

Multilayer source selection as a tool for supporting patent search and classification

In this paper we present a method that can be used to attain specific objectives in a typical prior art search process. The objectives are first to assist patent searchers in understanding the underlying technical concepts of a patent by identifying relevant international patent classification (IPC) codes and second to help them conduct a filtered search based on automatically selected IPCs. We view the automated selection of IPCs as a collection selection problem from the domain of distributed information retrieval (DIR) that can be addressed using existing DIR methods, which we extend and adapt for the patent domain. Our work exploits the intellectually assigned classifications codes that are used to categorize patents and to facilitate patent searches. In our method, manually assigned IPC codes of patent documents are used to cluster, distribute and index patents through hundreds or thousands of sub-collections. We propose a new multilayer collection selection method that effectively suggests classification codes exploiting the hierarchical classification schemes such as IPC/CPC. The new method in addition to utilizing the topical relevance of IPCs at a particular level of interest exploits the topical relevance of their ancestors in the IPC hierarchy and aggregates those multiple estimations of relevance to a single estimation. Experimental results on the CLEF-IP 2011 dataset show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-art methods from the DIR domain not only in identifying relevant IPC codes but also in retrieving relevant patent documents given a patent query.

Entropy and gravity concepts as new methodological indexes to investigate technological convergence: patent network-based approach.

The volatility and uncertainty in the process of technological developments are growing faster than ever due to rapid technological innovations. Such phenomena result in integration among disparate technology fields. At this point, it is a critical research issue to understand the different roles and the propensity of each element technology for technological convergence. In particular, the network-based approach provides a holistic view in terms of technological linkage structures. Furthermore, the development of new indicators based on network visualization can reveal the dynamic patterns among disparate technologies in the process of technological convergence and provide insights for future technological developments. This research attempts to analyze and discover the patterns of the international patent classification codes of the United States Patent and Trademark Office's patent data in printed electronics, which is a representative technology in the technological convergence process. To this end, we apply the physical idea as a new methodological approach to interpret technological convergence. More specifically, the concepts of entropy and gravity are applied to measure the activities among patent citations and the binding forces among heterogeneous technologies during technological convergence. By applying the entropy and gravity indexes, we could distinguish the characteristic role of each technology in printed electronics. At the technological convergence stage, each technology exhibits idiosyncratic dynamics which tend to decrease technological differences and heterogeneity. Furthermore, through nonlinear regression analysis, we have found the decreasing patterns of disparity over a given total period in the evolution of technological convergence. This research has discovered the specific role of each element technology field and has consequently identified the co-evolutionary patterns of technological convergence. These new findings on the evolutionary patterns of technological convergence provide some implications for engineering and technology foresight research, as well as for corporate strategy and technology policy.