Patent evaluation based on technological trajectory revealed in relevant prior patents

Abstract

It is a challenging task for firms to assess the importance of a patent and identify valuable patents as early as possible. Counting the number of citations received is a widely used method to assess the value of a patent. However, recently granted patents have few citations received, which makes the use of citation counts infeasible. In this paper, we propose a novel idea to evaluate the value of new or recently granted patents using recommended relevant prior patents. Our approach is to exploit trends in temporal patterns of relevant prior patents, which are highly related to patent values. We evaluate the proposed approach using two patent value evaluation tasks with a large-scale collection of U.S. patents. Experimental results show that the models created based on our idea significantly enhance those using the baseline features or patent backward citations. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.