Identify Technologies Used in Patents

Objective: Establish comparability of patents from different companies. Preparation for identify technology trends among competitors and in the industry. Assign individual patents to products without reading the patents themselves.

All known technologies are recorded in the hierarchically arranged IPC (International Patent Classification). Each invention of a patent application is assigned by the patent office examiners to one or more IPC classes based on its technical features. Multiple assignments are the norm.

Activate the "Filter" button while the list of hits is displayed. When the filter is active, statistics of the bibliographic data for all hits are provided by espacenet. Clicking on "IPC main groups" shows how many patents are assigned to a specific IPC. Multiple assignments for IPC classes are common, i.e. the invention described in the patent covers several different technical issues. Clicking on the name of the IPC class opens a new field with the description of this class.

Espacenet displays the IPC main groups in a 6-digit format in the filter. If many (e.g. >20) IPC classes are listed, it is advisable to display the IPC main groups in a 4-digit format for an initial rough overview. For this, the statistics from the filter can be loaded into an xls file: Click on the three dots to the right of the switch. In the xls file, open the "IPC Main Groups" tab, copy the "IPC Main Groups" column, and paste it as a new column in the table. Display the IPC in a 4-digit format (Data → Text to Columns → Fixed Width) and sort the table by the column with 4-digit IPCs. Determine the number of documents per 4-digit IPC. The description of each 4-digit IPC must be saved alongside it. Classes to which only a few documents - e.g. 10 - are assigned should be grouped together as "other".

The IPC assignment of your company’s patents must be determined in the same way.

Result:

Overview of the technologies used in the previously identified patents. Statement on the overlap between the technologies used in your own products and those of your competitors.

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