Top technology sectors by country

Which technology sectors are of primary significance to Finland? What about Israel or Italy? This visualization compares those countries, showing the top-5 most significant USPTO art units per country, in terms of numbers of US patents which issued in 2012 to assignees in those countries.

You can immediately see that art unit 2617 (cellular telephony) is the most significant art unit for Finland. For Israel it’s art unit 2624 (image analysis) and for Italy it’s art unit 2913 (one of the USPTO’s several design patent art units). No surprises there. Let’s look further.

For Finland, the next most significant art unit is 2916—another design patent art unit. Is that a surprise? No—the underlying patents pertain to handset design, a vital ingredient in the fiercely competitive cellular telephony sector.  [Click the FAQ tab and read item 6 to see how to check the underlying patents.]

Continuing with Finland, art unit 2618 (radio and satellite communications) is next—another close fit with cellular telephony. But then we have art unit 1741 (tires, adhesive bonding, glass/paper making, plastics shaping & molding). Does that make sense? Indeed it does—consider Finland’s strong pulp & paper technology sector and note that paper making comes within art unit 1741.

For Israel, the next most significant art unit is 2617 (cellular telephony), but note what comes next: art unit 1661 (plant patents). Is that a surprise? No—Israel has a significant flower export market.

No surprises when we look more closely at Italy either—the top-5 art units all pertain to design patents, reflecting Italy’s prominence in industrial design.

You can experiment with top-5 art unit (and top-5 IPC subclass) breakdowns for any countries of interest by clicking the Top Technologies tab above. Notice that, for Italy, the top IPC subclass is "not indicated". Why is that? It’s because there is no IPC classification for design patents.  As noted above, Italy’s top-5 technologies (in terms of USPTO art units and patents issued in 2012) pertain to design patents.

PCT utilization

Do most US patent applications originate as US national phase entries of Patent Cooperation Treaty applications, or are they directly filed in the USPTO without regard to the PCT?   The answer depends on whose applications we’re talking about.   Let’s explore.

Click the Assignees & Attorneys tab to open a visualization of the USPTO’s 2012 patent grant data.   Note the order of the countries listed in the Assignee Country section at the bottom.   You should see US, JP, Null (unknown), KR, DE, TW, FR, CN in that order (i.e. ranked according to the number of patent documents per assignee country).

Note the Filing Type section of the visualization.   Hover your mouse over it for an explanation of the PCT and non-PCT filing types.   Click the PCT row to reconfigure the visualization with data pertaining only to US patents which issued in 2012 from applications that entered the US national phase via the PCT.   The plant and design patent kind codes no longer appear—only the utility patent (and corresponding reissue) kind codes remain.   That makes sense, since the PCT pertains only to utility patent applications.

Note the new ranking order in the Assignee Country section.   You should see JP, US, DE, FR, Null (unknown), KR, GB, NL in that order.   This tells us that, in the context of US patents which issued in 2012, Japanese assignees were the heaviest users of the PCT national entry mechanism, followed by Americans, Germans, Koreans, etc.   "Null (unknown)" corresponds to patents for which no Attorney or Agent is indicated in the USPTO’s bibliographic data (this does not necessarily mean that the patents were not prosecuted by an IP firm).

In the Assignee section at the top of the visualization you’ll see some well known Japanese, Korean and German assignees.

Click a data bar in the Assignee Country section to reconfigure the visualization with data pertaining only to that country.   Notice the relative percentages of PCT vs. non-PCT filings for that country, as indicated in the Filing Type section of the visualization.   For example, over 60% of the US patents that issued to Norwegian assignees in 2012 were based on PCT national phase entries.

You can further reconfigure the visualization by clicking a data bar in the Assignee section, or in the Attorney or Agent section, or both, to restrict the visualization to a selected assignee, IP firm, or both.

Click the "Revert All" button (the circular back arrow) at the bottom of the visualization to go back to the initial visualization.   Try any different reconfiguration you like in order to see the relative importance of the PCT (in the context of US patents issued in 2012) from the perspective of any selected country, assignee or IP firm, or combinations thereof.

Design Patents

Unlike the art units which handle utility patent applications, the USPTO’s design patent art units are not partitioned according to subject matter. However, the USPTO does use the Locarno classification for industrial designs and Locarno classification information is included in the USPTO's bibliographic design patent data. Click the “Design Patents” tab above to explore the USPTO’s 2012 design patents from a Locarno subject matter classification, and other, perspectives.

Introduction

Many patent offices (e.g. USPTO, EPO, WIPO, SIPO, CIPO) publish their bibliographic patent data in XML format in accordance with WIPO standard ST.36.   Some patent offices (e.g. CIPO) make the data available free of charge, for non-commercial use.   Others (e.g. USPTO) make the data available free of charge with no usage restrictions.

The United States Patent & Trademark Office issued well over 250,000 patents in 2012. 
This blog will attempt to illustrate, via interactive working examples based on the USPTO’s 2012 bibliographic patent data, some ways in which multi-dimensional data sources and data analytic/visualization tools can derive powerful “business intelligence” information from the data.  This is not the sort of information typically derived via text/keyword searches in conducting novelty, patentability, infringement or validity type searches.

To get started, click one of the tabs above.