mergeflow.stream now features improved patent analytics. These analytics extract inventor-company-networks from patent documents and then visualize them in interactive graphs.
Inventor-company networks can be relevant for several reasons, for example:
- Co-inventor networks often reflect how teams in a company are organized. If several people are co-inventors, it is likely that they work together as a team. The patents of these co-inventors usually are topically related as well.
- Connections between companies may reflect cross-company collaboration. E.g. if two companies are co-assignees of a patent, these two companies probably are involved in some type of collaboration (research and development partnership, joint venture, etc.).
- Some inventors are more “central” in a co-inventor network than other inventors (“central” = have stronger connections to other inventors, or be connected to more inventors than others). These central inventors usually play an important role in a company’s research and development efforts.
- mergeflow.stream can analyze patents and non-patent documents in the same context. For instance, a user can create one topic profile with patent update feeds, feeds from scientific and technological publications, and feeds with investor activity news. This topic profile then provides a unified view on all these different types of sources.
Below are some examples for patent inventor-company networks. To keep things simple, we limit ourselves here to patent documents and do not include other, non-patent, information streams. All data are from patent update feeds from worldwide patent offices.
The screenshot below is for smart grid and smart meter patents. It shows the inventors at one organization, “Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute” in Korea (
http://www.etri.re.kr/eng/).
(click on the image for a larger view)
The graph shows co-inventor clusters, the strongest cluster at the top (around Soo Kwang Kim). Quite possibly the members of this cluster form a team at their research institute.
The screenshot below is based on patents related to speech processing technology. It shows a co-inventor network at Philips.
(click on the image for a larger view)
Similar to the smart meter and smart grid example, this graph shows distinguishable co-inventor networks (three in this case). Furthermore, in the graph, stronger lines reflect more common patents. For instance, in the co-inventor network in the lower right, two inventors are more closely related than others: Eric Cohen-Solal and Michael Chun-chieh Lee. In their network, these two inventors are more central than the other inventors.
This graph was extracted based on news from a two-week time window. The graph shows relations between several investors and technology fields. For instance, there is a group of investors related to “big data” and “unstructured data” (FirstMark Capital, Greycroft Partners, and IA Ventures, at around 6 o’clock in the graph). This group was extracted from news articles reporting on a $15mio financing round at NewsCred (http://www.newscred.com/). One of these news articles is at PEHub (http://www.pehub.com/191725/191725/).
