Introduction to Patents: Innovation Trend Analysis (ITA)

Analyzing innovation trends in patent collections enables you to extract competitive intelligence from patents by analyzing and visualizing patent bibliographic data. With innovation trend analysis, you gain insights into your competitive landscape to position yourself for successful entry into new markets, to set new trends, or to drive product and process improvements.

Researching and analyzing patents and innovation trends

On the main menu, click Patents: Innovation Trend Analysis, and then under I want to, click one of the following:

Analyze technology - identify established and emerging technology trends, as well as the key companies involved in their development.

Analysis results include a company list, a patent activity chart for up to five selected companies, a list of inventors, and a patent bibliographic table. You can view each inventor's patent activity, patent list, and patent class distribution.

Analyze companies - generate a detailed innovation profile for one or more companies to identify their core technologies and key inventors. You can also focus the profile on a specific technology. You can compare the innovation profiles of up to five companies, helping you to identify future research, development, and licensing opportunities.

Profile and analysis results include a company patenting activity chart, a list of inventors, patent bibliographic information, and patent classes. You can view each inventor's patent trend, patent list, and patent class distribution. For each patent class, you can view the number of patents that are issued annually.

Search patents - research semantically-indexed and presummarized patent documents in selected patent collections, and to analyze bibliographic data of patents.
Analyze patent references generates a list of backward and forward references to help you assess the value of a technology, as well as to identify important technology trends and the owners of these key technologies.

Patents and ITA results

Search results from patent searches and analysis of innovation trends are displayed below the query area. Results are displayed in the following tabs:

Overview: displays a Patents Activity chart for all patents found by your search, including charts that show the top five assignees, inventors, and patent classes.
Citations & Categories: displays patent search results as a list of answers and citations, as well as grouping results by categories and in category groups.
Patents: displays a table of all patents, publication dates, titles, and assignees that are found by your search.
Assignees: displays a table of assignees (companies) for all patents found by your search, the number of patents for each assignee, and the activity trend for each assignee.
Inventors: displays a table of inventors for all patents found by your search, the number of patents for each inventor, and the activity trend for each inventor.
Patent Classes: displays a table of patent classes and their codes for all patents found by your search, the number of patents for each class, and the activity trend for each class.

About patent queries

There are three types of patent queries:

Technology queries, which help you to focus your analysis on a specific technology
Company (or assignee) queries, which help you to analyze patent activity of one or more companies (or patent assignees)
General patent queries, which search selected patent collections (knowledge bases)

Goldfire’s natural language searches and keyword searches are based on sophisticated linguistic processing technology, surpassing the capabilities of conventional searches. For example, both the natural language search and the keyword search are able to automatically find all grammatical variations of a word based on its root, without requiring you to specify these variations in a complex Boolean expression. Therefore, if you enter only the singular form of a noun in the query, both the singular and the plural forms are automatically searched by the software. In the case of verb phrases, the variations in verb tense and voice are automatically considered.

In addition, analysis of patents enables you to specify search criteria for specific patent fields—the standardized sections that are used to organize patent information.