Corporate Invention Board

Innovation can certainly not be reduced to technological inventions protected by patents. Business models, brands, trade secrets also have an economic value. Nevertheless, they are excluded from the perimeter of innovations protected by patents: by nature in the two first cases and by choice in the last one.

Despite this restriction, the study of patents constitutes a powerful tool to analyze the potential of an industrial actor or of a geographical area. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA, the Observatory of Sciences and Technology (OST) in France, Eurostat or the Organization for Economic Co-operation for Development (OECD) all use indicators based on these industrial property rights for their annual reports on science and technology.

In spite of these well-developed statistical uses, the choice of patents’ type of document to be analyzed is however not obvious. The difficulty stems from the geographically limited character of the protection granted by these titles of industrial property: a patent grants a temporary monopoly on a national territory.

To obtain a protection on various national markets, an assignee has to apply for patent protection from the national patent office in each country it is aimed at. A single invention is thus protected by a family of patents. This family is composed of a first patent - known as the priority one - which establishes the anteriority of the invention; then a series of patents aiming to extend the protection of this invention beyond the country in which it was initially protected. The patent portfolio of a multinational group thus includes priority patents and their many extensions which reveal its international sales strategy. This duality makes any simple calculation problematic: a single invention is protected by multiple patents - registered in various offices.

To explore the technological strategy of multinational groups, the Corporate Invention Board focuses, - in accordance with recent methodological developments- on the analysis of priority patents applications. Priority patents applications have the advantage of a date of filing closer to that of the invention - contrary to the extensions which are generally granted at later dates. Priority patents applications are thus better adapted to stay close to the initial time of invention.

The Corporate Invention Board project mainly analyzes three types of administrative information contained in the patent documents.

The first is the Patent’s assignee’s name which links an invention to the industrial group it belongs to. Through this, the nationality of the global ultimate owner of the invention can be identified as well.

The second administrative information is the private address of the inventor. Through this, it is possible to locate the place of the invention, independently of the national office in which the patent was registered and of the nationality of the industrial group (the assignee) to which it was granted. Thus, the address in India of an inventor of a priority patent granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to a British industrial group is analyzed as built on Indian technological competences mobilized by a British industrial group.

The third administrative information relates to the technological field. This information, which appears in the “international patent classification” of the Worldwide Intellectual Property Organization of (WIPO) breaks down patents between 35 technological sub-fields, which are all gathered into 5 larger technological domains. Thus, if category G03C appears in a patent, the invention concerned will be attached to the technological field of optics and the technological domain of the instrumentation.

When a patent has multiple attributions, the Corporate Invention Board project uses fractional counts. If a priority patent reveals, for example, two inventors with German addresses and a third with a French address, the corresponding invention is considered as building on 2/3 of competences originated from Germany and on 1/3 originated from France. The same procedure is used for the counts by technologies or attribution of an invention to several industrial groups.