Patents are written in a complex way and it is necessary to find the right concept and information from patents with the help of categorization.
Finding gaps in the technology space (also known as white space analysis) provides your legal and technology teams with inputs on where there is room for technology development and protection and thereby tap a technology area ahead of the competition.
Why do you need to categorize your patents?
Patents disclose information in complex language and in a complex manner. Extracting the right industry-specific concepts and information from patents is crucial for most analyses. This is where categorization of patents comes into action. Categorization is necessary to bring real-world business context to various parameters involved in the patent document. It is done to align patent datasets to the way your company understands the business. You can think of this as being able to see the patents with your own lens.
How to decide what categories to choose for your patents?
The same patent data can be categorized in many ways. The choice of categories makes a real impact on your analysis and so this “thinking” step is critical. Some of the common styles of categories are Problems, Solutions to the problems, Product parts, processes used, compositions, ingredients, or materials.
Bucketing the patents into the categories
The methods to categorize fall into three basic types namely:
- Manual categorization
- Semi-automated categorization
- Fully automated categorization
Categorization of patents is the foundation for doing gap analysis. Identified gaps should be discussed with technical experts to evaluate the feasibility of converting them into opportunities.
PatSeer contains a complete set of pre-processing, analysis, and mapping tools to aid in each step of finding gaps. Create clusters/topic maps, IPC/CPC based maps, create custom taxonomy and mapping patents to create categories. Use matrix-based analysis to analyze category buckets and find white spaces, if any. Multi-generation forward citation analysis feature will help you track the use of technology in different application areas and to track competitor’s patent filing trends.
Read our latest article here to find how the categorization of patents helps in gap analysis and in finding potential opportunities.
