The guidance of R&D personnel is particularly important. Because the mining of software patents is usually based on a core technical scheme or a product (platform, application, etc. ) R&D project, the digger first needs to guide R&D personnel to tell the core technical scheme or the whole R&D project itself. Specifically including:
1) application scenarios and target users of the software
Because software can be used in all walks of life, and the software itself can be subdivided into fields, it is necessary to guide R&D personnel to tell the application scenarios and target users of the software. For example, whether the software is used in payment, logistics, smart home appliances and other fields. , and whether the target users of the software are public users or specific users (such as office lobby staff, bank employees or salesmen, etc.). ).
2) Main functions and highlights of the product
The purpose of guiding R&D personnel to talk about the main functions and highlights of the product is to clarify "what can this software do" and "what does this software do that is different from other software", in which the highlights of the product can be used to locate important innovation points when excavating specific innovation points in the later stage. Generally speaking, R&D personnel will talk about the main functions and highlights of products according to their own understanding of peers. Therefore, after digging out the innovation points, it is necessary to search the existing technology and sort out the important innovation points on the basis of the existing technology.
Second, technical decomposition.
After a certain understanding of the core technical scheme and the project itself, in order to find out the innovation points, it is necessary to disassemble the "big" software into "small" parts to excavate the technological innovation points. Specifically including:
1) disassembles from the function.
This disassembly method is the most common for software patent mining, because most software can be divided based on function, and the technical scheme of software patent is generally described from the perspective of function. In functional disassembly, it can be disassembled step by step until the functional modules are minimized. Then, starting from different functional modules, guide R&D personnel to talk about their innovations. For example, whether this function exists in similar products, if it does not exist, it is a new function, and if it exists, it will further guide the realization of the function whether there is any difference.
2) Disassemble from the technical framework.
The software needs to run in the computer system. For computers, technicians usually understand the logical structure and functional characteristics of computers through the structure of computer systems. For example, computer systems can be divided into basic application layer, basic platform layer and data layer. This longitudinal structure is usually familiar to the skilled person. Therefore, when excavating the innovation, we can also split it from the technical architecture, and guide R&D personnel to tell the innovation from all levels, so as to accurately find the innovation of software patents.
Decompose from the business process
Many software applications are used to implement various business processes, which are usually divided into multiple stages. Therefore, in the mining of software patents, the whole business process can be divided into multiple stages, and R&D personnel can be guided to tell the innovation points from different stages, so as to find the innovation points of software patents.
The above just shows several common ways to do software patent mining, but it is certainly not limited to these ways. It should be noted that the mining of software patents is not just one of them. In fact, in the process of patent mining, various methods should be adopted comprehensively in order to realize comprehensive mining. For example, when disassembling from the technical architecture, for the application layer, it is necessary to further guide R&D personnel to divide from the perspective of functions and find innovations for each function. Moreover, after combing the innovations in all links, we should also pay attention to the relevance between different innovations, such as whether different innovations are based on solving the same technical problem. Therefore, after sorting out the innovations, we should also consider whether it is necessary to merge multiple innovations into one application. In addition, in the process of mining, we should think divergently to find some related technical factors, so as to find other possible technological innovations, and finally form a patent mining list according to the excavated innovations.