Authors
Dr. Markus Schafheutle
Consultant
Muralidhara A
JMP
Objective
This study requires the use of unstructured data analysis to understand and analyze the text related to patents filed by different companies.
Background
A patent is a form of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from exploiting the patented technology, including making, using or selling the patented invention. Organizations invest a lot of resources in inventing a new technology or a design, and this continuous effort is vital to its future success. Acquiring a patent is important for the company after it develops any innovative product or solution as it enhances and protects the value of the product or service.
Patent protection is granted for a limited period, generally 20 years from the filing date of the application. Patents are territorial rights, meaning the exclusive rights are only applicable in the country or region in which a patent has been filed and granted, in accordance with the law of that country or region. A patent is typically issued to the individual inventor and is granted by a national or regional patent office. In most countries, if an employee develops an invention as per employment contract, the invention (and the related patent rights) will belong to the enterprise.
Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/) is a search engine that indexes patents and patent applications spanning more than 350 years. It indexes more than 87 million patents and patent applications with full text from 17 patent offices from the US, Europe, China, Japan, Korea, Canada, UK, Russia and other countries. These documents include the entire collection of granted patents and published patent applications from each database, which belong in the public domain.
The International Patent Classification (IPC) is a hierarchical patent classification system used in over 100 countries to classify the content of patents in a uniform manner. The classification is updated regularly. The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is an extension of the IPC and is divided into nine sections (A-H and Y), which in turn are subdivided into classes, subclasses, groups and subgroups. There are approximately 250,000 classification entries.
The Task
The patent application data was extracted from Google patents advanced search website (https://patents.google.com/advanced) for IPC code C09, which mostly includes dyes, paints, polishes, natural resins and adhesives and compositions as part of the patent. The organizations or assignees selected were a group of chemical companies, namely BASF, PPG, DuPont, Herberts, Nippon Paint and Ciba, as shown in Exhibit 1 (see PDF). The search was also restricted to English language and patent type for further analysis.
It is important to search for "Family" to prevent duplication of the same patent in different countries. Data was extracted and downloaded from Google Patents for these companies and their local subsidiaries and potential predecessors, resulting in roughly 1,330 hits. Please note that this information might change, as it is real-time information.
By clicking the download button, the data is downloaded as a .csv file to a local desktop.
By open the .csv file using Excel, it will appear in the format shown below, with the first row representing the URL details of the search followed by the column names in the second row.
The JMP Add-In for Excel provides new capabilities to JMP and Excel users on Windows, as shown in Exhibit 2 (see PDF). Use the JMP Add-In for Excel to transfer a worksheet from Excel to the following data table directly.
The other two variables – result link and representative figure link – are internet links for the line items in the data; they are not part of the analysis so they can be ignored or deleted. Inventor/Author column can also be ignored. A new JMP data table will be created from the Excel data for further analysis. Now we have imported the patent data as a JMP data set.