Example:

A leader company in its domain wants to take stock of existing technologies to detect or validate the ones emerging and, if it’s relevant, the ones which have been ignored, in the aim to launch a new device on the market.

Analyzed information:

3500 patent notices come from commercial databases Thomson-Derwent and PatBase, 2500 scientific publications from Scopus

Method

Categorization of documents by type of known devices:

• Custom fields creation with the expert vocabulary
• Terminological lists insertion: lexicon, thesaurus

Visualization of graphic representations on statistics:

• Bar graph comparing the different devices by their number of patent over them.
• Evolution measurement, through time, on the number of patents over the different type of devices.
• To check out the main companies having patented over these different type of devices

Uncategorized information Analysis

• Specific statistic on this set of documents
• Reading notices

Weak signals Analysis

• Emerging elements search (IPC, vocabulary, actors) inside the lists and diagram about the elements appearing and disappearing by a chosen period of time.
• Increasing elements search (IPC, vocabulary, actors) inside the lists and diagram about the elements use acceleration.

• Innovating actors’ identification, example: companies using an emerging vocabulary.
• Identification of actors which both publish articles and patent.

Conclusion

“minimizing
risks and costs”.

About 7000 articles and patent notices have been analyzed by 2 experts during 1 month, providing a synthetic document. This document, listing both well controlled and not mastered technologies by the company, has fuelled the experts’ thinking about the company’s lines of research.