Patent Management for Technology Forecasting: A Case Study of the Bio-Industry

Patents are an integral part of intellectual property rights and contain substantial amounts of information on developed technologies. Thus, patent management plays an important role in addressing the competitive environment surrounding intellectual property rights. Technology forecasting is an important part of patent management. Any successful R&D strategy requires effective technology forecasting. This paper proposes a technology forecasting method based on various data mining techniques for analysing patents and a patent management approach using the result of technology forecasting. For case study, biotechnology-related patent documents from the US Patent and Trademark Office have been considered. The performance of the proposed method has been verified by this case study.