Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Patent valuation based on text mining and survival analysis

  • Published:
The Journal of Technology Transfer Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Assessing the value of a patent is crucial not only at the licensing stage but also during the resolution of a patent infringement lawsuit. In this study, we use text mining to identify important factors associated with patent value as represented by its survival period. The variables retrieved from text mining were the Euclidian distance of patent claims between a patent and its backward cited patents, or forward cited patents, and the singular value decompositions (SVDs) of patent claims. After applying Weibull regression to 3D printing patents, the following factors were found to have significant associations with the survival time of a patent: the Euclidian distance of claims between a patent and its forward cited patents, the average number of forward citations, whether Germany is included among the family patent countries, whether the patent is transferred to another, and the presence of five SVDs. Our study is expected to contribute to enhancing patent valuation in consideration of patent infringement risk.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Albert, M., Avery, D., Narin, F., & McAllister, P. (1991). Direct validation of citation counts as indicators of industrially important patents. Research Policy, 20(3), 251–259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amine, A., Elberrichi, Z., & Simonet, M. (2010). Evaluation of text clustering methods using wordNet. The International Arab Journal of Information Technology, 7(4), 349–357.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ananiadou, S., Kell, D. B., & Tsujii, J. I. (2006). Text mining and its potential applications in systems biology. Trends in Biotechnology, 24(12), 571–579.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baeza-Yates, R., & Ribeiro-Neto, B. (1999). Modern Information Retrival. New York: ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudry, M., & Dumont, B. (2006). Patent renewals as options: improving the mechanism for weeding out lousy patents. Review of Industrial Organization, 28(1), 41–62.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bergmann, I., Butzke, D., Walter, L., Fuerste, J. P., Moehrle, M. G., & Erdmann, V. A. (2008). Evaluating the risk of patent infringement by means of semantic patent analysis: The case of DNA chips. R&D Management, 38(5), 550–562.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Burke, P., & Reitzig, M. (2007). Measuring patent assessment quality: Analyzing the degree of kind of (in)consistency in patent offices’ decision making. Research Policy, 36(9), 1404–1430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carpenter, M. P., Narin, F., & Woolf, P. (2005). Citation rates to technologically important patents. World Patent Information, 3(4), 160–163.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Choo, K. N., & Park, K. H. (2010). A study on the Determinants of the Economic Value of Patents Using Renewal Data. The Knowledge Management Research, 11(1), 65–81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dumais, S. T. (1991). Improving the retrieval of information from external sources. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 23(2), 229–236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ernst, H., Leptien, C., & Vitt, J. (2000). Inventors are not alike: The distribution of patenting output among industrial R&D personnel. IEEE Transactions of Engineering Management, 47(2), 184–199.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, T., & Henkel, J. (2012). Patent trolls on markets for technology: An empirical analysis of NPE’s patent acquisitions. Research Policy, 41(9), 1519–1533.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gronqvist, C. (2009). The private value of patents by patent characteristics: evidence from Finland. Journal of Technology Transfer, 34(2), 159–168.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guellec, D., & Van Pottelsbergue de la Potterie, B. (2000). Applications, grants and the value of patent. Economics Letters, 69(1), 109–114.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hall, B., Jaffe, A., & Trajtenberg, M. (2005). Market value and patent citations. The Rand Journal of Economics, 36(1), 16–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harhoff, D., Narin, F., Scherer, F., & Vopel, K. (1999). Citation frequency and the value of patented inventions. Review of Economics and Statistics, 81(3), 511–515.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harhoff, D., & Reitzig, M. (2004). Determinants of opposition against EPO patent grants: The case of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 22(4), 443–480.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harhoff, D., Scherer, F., & Vopel, K. (2003). Citations, family size, opposition and the value of patent rights. Research Policy, 32(8), 1343–1363.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Homayouni, R., Heinrich, K., Wei, L., & Berry, M. W. (2005). Gene clustering by latent semantic indexing of MEDLINE abstracts. Bioinformatics, 21(1), 104–115.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karki, M. M. S. (1997). Patent citation analysis: A policy analysis tool. World Patent Information, 19(4), 269–272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lanjouw, J. O., Pakes, A., & Putnam, J. (1998). How to count patents and value intellectual property: The uses of patent renewal and application data. The Journal of Industrial Economics, 46(4), 405–432.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lanjouw, J. O., Schankerman, M. (1999). The quality of ideas: Measuring innovation with multiple indicators. NBER Working Paper 7345.

  • Lee, T. H., (2003). Latent Semantic Analysis with Axes Rotation and Its Application to Topic Based Text Categorization and Contextual Disambiguation of a Word. Doctoral dissertation. Seoul national university, Korea.

  • Lee, Y. G. (2008). Patent licensability and life: A study of U.S. patents registered by South Korean public research institutes. Scientometrics, 75(3), 463–471.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, C., Song, B., & Park, Y. (2013). How to assess patent infringement risks: a semantic patent claim analysis using dependency relationships. Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, 25(1), 23–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lerner, L. (1994). The importance of patent scope: an empirical analysis. RAND Journal of Economics, 25(2), 319–333.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu, K., Arthurs, J., Cullen, J., & Alexander, R. (2008). Internal sequential innovations: How does interrelatedness affect patent renewal? Research Policy, 37(5), 946–953.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moehrle, M. G. (2010). Measures for textual patent similarities: a guided way to select appropriate approaches. Scientometrics, 85(1), 95–109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moehrle, M. G., & Gerken, J. M. (2012). Measuring textual patent similarity on the basis of combined concepts: design decisions and their consequences. Scientometrics, 91(3), 805–826.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moore, K. (2005). Worthless patents. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 20(4), 1521–1552.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nahm, U. Y., & Mooney, R. J., (2001). Mining soft-matching rules from textual data. In Proceedings of the 17th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence Vol. 2 (pp. 979–984). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.

  • Narin, F., Noma, E., & Perry, R. (1987). Patents as indicators of corporate technological strength. Research Policy, 16(2–4), 143–155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oda, T., Gemba, K., & Matsushima, K. (2008). Enhanced co-citation analysis using frameworks. Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, 20(2), 217–229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pakes, A. (1986). Patents as options: Some estimates of the value of holding European patent stocks. Econometrica, 54(4), 755–784.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pakes, A., & Schankerman, M., (1979). The rate of obsolescence of knowledge, research gestation lags, and the private rate of return to research resources. NBER working paper series 346.

  • Park, Y., Lee, S., & Lee, S. (2012a). Patent analysis for promoting technology transfer in multi-technology industries: the Korean aerospace industry case. The Journal of Technology Transfer, 37(3), 355–374.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Park, H., Yoon, J., & Kim, K. (2012b). Identifying patent infringement using SAO based semantic technological similarities. Scientometrics, 90(2), 515–529.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, J. D. (1996). The value of international patent rights. UMI Dissertation services.

  • Reitzig, M. (2003). What determines patent value? Insights from the semiconductor industry. Research Policy, 32(1), 13–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reitzig, M. (2004). Improving patent valuations for management purposes: Validating new indicators by analyzing application rationales. Research Policy, 33(6–7), 939–957.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ruiz, A. M., & Banet, T. A. (2009). Toward the definition of a structural equation model of patent value: PLS path modeling with formative constructs. Revstat Statistical Journal, 7(3), 265–290.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sapsalis, E., Pottelsberghe, Van, de la Potterie, B., & Navon, R. (2006). Academic versus industry patenting: An in-depth analysis of what determines patent value. Research Policy, 35(10), 1631–1645.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schankerman, M., & Pakes, A. (1986). Estimates of the value of patent rights in European countries during post-1950 period. Economic Journal, 96, 1052–1076.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sterzi, V. (2013). Patent quality and ownership: An analysis of UK faculty patenting. Research Policy, 42(2), 564–576.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, P. (1999). The effect of technological impact upon patent renewal decisions. Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, 11(2), 181–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trajtenberg, M. (1990). A penny for your quotes: Patent citations and the value of innovations. The Rand Journal of Economics, 21(1), 172–187.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tseng, Y. H., Lin, C. J., & Lin, Y. I. (2007). Text mining techniques for patent analysis. Information Processing and Management, 43(5), 1216–1247.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • USPTO status search homepage, http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair?selectedTab=pair_search&isSubmitted=isSubmitted&dosnum=&public_selectedSearchOption=.

  • WISDOMAIN patent data, http://www.wisdomain.com.

  • Zaman, A. N. K., & Brown, C. G. (2010). Latent semantic indexing and large dataset: Study of term-weighting schemes. In Digital Information Management (ICDIM), 2010 5th International Conference on IEEE (pp. 1–4).

  • Zhong, N., Li, Y., & Wu, S. T. (2012). Effective pattern discovery for text mining. Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 24(1), 30–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (2013R1A2A1A09004699).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Industrial Engineering, Yonsei University, 134 Shinchon–dong, Seoul, 120–749, Republic of Korea

    Eun Jin Han & So Young Sohn

Authors
  1. Eun Jin Han
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. So Young Sohn
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to So Young Sohn.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 7.

Table 7 The distribution of 709 patents by year and country
Full size table

Appendix 2

See Table 8.

Table 8 The upper 3 % of IPC
Full size table

Appendix 3

See Table 9.

Table 9 The upper 3 % of USPC
Full size table

Appendix 4

See Table 10.

Table 10 The largest weighted terms with positive coefficient and negative coefficient of each SVDs
Full size table

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Han, E.J., Sohn, S.Y. Patent valuation based on text mining and survival analysis. J Technol Transf 40, 821–839 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-014-9367-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-014-9367-6

Keywords

JEL Classification

Search

Navigation