Background of patent analysis method

From 65438 to 0474, the first patent law appeared in the world, which has been more than 500 years. The SPTO Patent and Trademark Office (U America) defines a patent as an invention, which is the license of the inventor's intellectual property rights. As a legal system that encourages invention and creation, promotes scientific and technological progress and economic development, patent has developed rapidly. Up to now, there are 47 million patents in the world, and more than 1 10,000 patent documents are added every year in the world. Because enterprises can obtain the exclusive right to produce and sell the results by developing technology and applying for patents, thus establishing their own competitive advantages, the number of patents has increased so rapidly.

Although patent data is accumulating, people don't realize the potential value that it can be transformed into competitive intelligence. With the acceleration of technological development, technology is becoming more and more important to the survival and competitive strategy of enterprises. Technological progress largely determines the changes in the market. The new leading technology quickly gave birth to new market areas, while the old market was quickly eliminated. Faced with the rapid change of technology, the past strategic and competitive analysis methods can not predict its development trend well, so enterprise decision makers begin to look for new methods that can effectively manage internal technology sources and monitor external technology environment. It is in this case that people find that patent, as an invention, contains the value of technological innovation. Analyzing a large number of patent data can grasp the technical trend and understand the technical competitiveness.

The initial generation of patent analysis method is relatively slow. Seidel first put forward the concept of patent citation analysis in 1949. He pointed out that patent citation refers to the citation of previous patents by subsequent patents based on similar scientific viewpoints, and Cedell also put forward the viewpoint of the technical relative importance of high-frequency citation patents. However, it was not until 198 1 that his ideas were gradually confirmed by people. After 1990s, with the continuous development and perfection of information technology, network technology and patent database, patent analysis method has been really applied to enterprise strategy and competition analysis, and its method system has been established and improved.