Authors:
Kohei Tsuda
;
Frank J. Rinaldo
;
Victor V. Kryssanov
and
Ruck Thawonmas
Affiliation:
Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Keyword(s):
Patent, Inventorship networks, Power law.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Business and Social Applications
;
Data Engineering
;
Databases and Data Security
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Enterprise Software Technologies
;
Health Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Management
;
Methodologies, Processes and Platforms
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Software Engineering
;
Virtual Organizations
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Workflow Management and Databases
;
Workflow Management Systems
Abstract:
Technological and research strategies are becoming more significant as they create future value in the market. The core of these strategies is the creation of patents, which help eliminate or contain competition. Companies seek to learn the research strategies of their competitors. At the same time, all companies try to hide their own strategies but they generally cannot, because patents have to be filed and therefore exposed at a patent office and even made globally (e.g. via the WWW) accessible on-line. Part of the technological strategy of a company can be determined by observing the patents it files, their timing and their authors. There have been many studies about patents reported in the literature, with most of them focusing on the connectivities existing in co-citation, co-patent networks. In the presented work, the focus is on the inventors. Given the patent files of a company, one could possibly predict the company’s current and future research and production strategies. Fu
rthermore, if the inventors are known, the human resources of the corresponding companies could naturally be scrutinized. The latter would allow to estimate the mechanism prevailing in the process of patent creation at a specific company. A novel approach to analyze the professional activities of company inventors is proposed and applied to determine the inventive strategy of Japanese manufacturing companies. The presented results can be used to optimize knowledge and recourse management within a company.
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