New Patent Mapping System Helps Find Innovation Pathways

Society and Culture

New Patent Mapping System Helps Find Innovation Pathways

January 14, 2014 • Atlanta, GA

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The full patent map shows 466 technology categories and 35 technological areas. Each node color represents a technological area; lines represent relationships between technology categories; labels for technological areas are placed close to the categories with largest number of patent applications in each area. (Courtesy of Luciano Kay)

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What’s likely to be the “next big thing?” What might be the most fertile areas for innovation? Where should countries and companies invest their limited research funds? What technology areas are a company’s competitors pursuing?

To help answer those questions, researchers, policy-makers and R&D directors study patent maps, which provide a visual representation of where universities, companies and other organizations are protecting intellectual property produced by their research. But finding real trends in these maps can be difficult because categories with large numbers of patents – pharmaceuticals, for instance – are usually treated the same as areas with few patents.

Now, a new patent mapping system that considers how patents cite one another may help researchers better understand the relationships between technologies – and how they may come together to spur disruptive new areas of innovation. The system, which also categorizes patents in a new way, was produced by a team of researchers from three universities and an Atlanta-based producer of data-mining software.

“What we are trying to do is forecast innovation pathways,” said Alan Porter, professor emeritus in the School of Public Policy and the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the project’s principal investigator. “We take data on research and development, such as publications and patents, and we try to elicit some intelligence to help us gain a sense for where things are headed.”

Patent maps for major corporations can show where those firms plan to diversify, or conversely, where their technological weaknesses are. Looking at a nation’s patent map might also suggest areas where R&D should be expanded to support new areas of innovation, or to fill gaps that may hinder economic growth, he said.

Innovation often occurs at the intersection of major technology sectors, noted Jan Youtie, director of policy research services in Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. Studying the relationships between different areas can help suggest where the innovation is occurring and what technologies are fueling it. Patent maps can also show how certain disciplines evolve.

“You can see where the portfolio is, and how it is changing,” explained Youtie, who is also an adjunct associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy. “In the case of nanotechnology, for example, you can see that most of the patents are in materials and physics, though over time the number of patents in the bio-nano area is growing.”

The patent mapping research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, will be described in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). In addition to Youtie and Porter, the research was conducted by former Georgia Tech graduate student Luciano Kay, now a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California Santa Barbara.

“The goal for this research was to create a new type of global patent map that was not tied into existing patent classification systems,” Kay said. “We also wanted an approach that would classify patents into categories or clusters in a graphical representation of interrelated technologies even though they may be located in different sections and levels of the standard patent classification.”

The International Patent Classification (IPC) system is based on a hierarchy of eight top-level classes such as “human necessity” and “electricity.” Patent applications are further classified into 600 or so sub-classes beneath the top-level classes.

Critics note that the IPC brings together technologies such as drugs and hats under the “human necessity” class -- technologies that are not really closely related. The system also puts technologies that are closely related – pharmaceuticals and organic chemistry, for instance – into different classes.

The new Patent Overlay Mapping system does away with this hierarchy, and instead considers the similarity between technologies by noting connections between patents – which ones are cited by other patents.

“We completely disaggregated the patient classification system and looked at all the categories with at least a thousand patents,” Youtie explained. “We think our map gets closer to measuring the ideas of technological similarity and distance.”

Maps produced by the system provide visual information relating the distances between technologies. The maps can also highlight the density of patenting activity, showing where investments are being made. And they can show gaps where future R&D investments may be needed to provide connections between related technologies.

The researchers produced a series of patent maps by applying their new system to 760,000 patent records filed in the European Patent Office between 2000 and 2006. The data came from the PatStat database, and was analyzed using a variety of tools, including the VantagePoint software developed by Search Technology of Norcross, along with Georgia Tech and Intelligent Information Services Corporation.

One surprise in the work was the interdisciplinary nature of many of the 35 patent factors the researchers identified. For instance, the classification “vehicles” included six of the eight sections defined by the IPC system. Only five of the 35 factors were confined to a single section, Youtie said.

Because the researchers adopted a new classification system, other researchers wanting to follow their approach will have use a thesaurus that translates existing IPC classes to the new system. That conversion system is available online.

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team also included Ismael Rafols of Universitat Politecnica de Valencia in Spain and Nils Newman of Intelligent Information Services Corp.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (Award No. 0531194) and NSF Award No. 1064146. The research was also undertaken in collaboration with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, University of California Santa Barbara (NSF Awards No. 0938099 and No. 0531184). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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Writer: John Toon

Expert Voices

Richard Utz

Chair and Professor

School of Literature, Media, and Communication

Winter is Coming (Back, This Sunday)

This Sunday, HBO will broadcast the first episode of season seven of its hit show, Game of Thrones (GoT). Last year at least 23 million Americans watched each episode of season six. Professor Richard Utz is more than a fan — he’s an expert observer. He specializes in the study of literature, film, media and communication. His research also focuses on the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times.

GoT includes dozens of features commonly considered typical of the historical period commonly called the Middle Ages (from the fifth to the 15th century): premodern feudalist government structures; kings, queens, knights, and squires; castles, dungeons, and dragons; random violence; swords and sorcery; etc. In addition, George R.R. Martin, the author of the novels on which the TV series is based, has stated that his story is grounded in history and wants to provide an alternative to the syrupy depiction of medieval culture in Disney movies.

However, despite Martin’s intentions, there is not a single event or character in the show that directly represents any actual historical event or person. Thus, his story takes place in a world that does not depend on historicity, unlike the similarly stark shows such as Vikings and The Last Kingdom. GoT is much more like the many medieval-themed computer games that vaguely remind us of medieval times, but no longer aim at a specific time in the past. Based on Neo, the unique fictional character in The Matrix movie, I call such stories “neomedievalist.”

Does this mean that 21st century audiences are developing a preference for stories in worlds independent of history, with their own languages, social structures, rules, etc.? And could the contemporary technologies that enable us to create such unique environments (interactivity, world-building games and, in a few years perhaps, holodecks) be responsible for this preference? It’s too early to answer these questions. What I can say with confidence is that the neomedievalist elements in GoT are only partially responsible for the show’s success. GoT’s audiences like the combination of attractive world building, thriller-fiction pacing; complex characters; guilt-free barbarism, violence, and sex; and Sopranos-like family drama. None of these features is intrinsically ‘medieval.’

Utz also wrote opinion articles on this topic for Inside Higher Ed and Time in anticipation of season seven.

Kimberely Isett is in the Ivan Allen School of Liberal Arts.

Kimberley Isett

Associate Professor

School of Public Policy

Senate Health Bill is Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

To borrow an observation, health care is complex. Central to our health outcomes is access to care. One type of access – financial access – is the type that the Affordable Care Act expanded for millions of Americans. That is what’s primarily at stake in the Senate’s new bill, says Kimberley Isett, an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech.

Access to care is comprised of many things: Are there facilities to get care and providers to give it? Are there excessively long waits or distances to travel to receive care? And is there an available payer for care? Financial access is not sufficient to guarantee physical access to care, but it is necessary. There are several ways the current Senate Bill has an impact on access:

1. The combination of more than $800 billion in cuts to federal money, with spending caps to limit the federal financial liability, will force states to either make up the difference or cut services. The proposed Senate cuts exceed those passed by the House.

Result: 14 million people newly covered under the Affordable Care Act expansion may be cut from Medicaid.

2. Tax subsidies are cut and deductibles are likely to rise. This will price many individuals out of the new insurance markets.

Result: More people will be uninsured because they are too poor to afford the marketplace but “too rich” to qualify for Medicaid.

3. While people with pre-existing conditions will be able to get insurance, it won’t cover basic health care needs because of waivers allowed in the bill. Community rating is also in jeopardy. This requires insurers charge rates based on a population, not individual backgrounds so that sicker people aren’t charged more for insurance.

Result: People with known health care needs will be forced to pay more for less coverage. This will result in huge disparities in care and large premiums for those who are most unable to bear the burden.

The Senate bill would also decrease access to health care facilities because rural hospitals are already in jeopardy of closing. These hospitals serve a high percentage of the sickest and poorest among us who rely heavily on Medicaid. If Medicaid coverage shrinks, hospitals won’t get paid. If hospitals don’t get paid, they will be forced to close, leaving these rural populations without any realistic access to providers. This is already dire across the country, and the Senate bill would worsen the situation. An estimated 22 million individuals will be left without financial access to care by this bill.

Read more here.

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