Discovering competitive intelligence by mining changes in patent trends

Obtaining sufficient competitive intelligence is a critical factor in helping business managers gain and maintain competitive advantages. Patent data is an important source of competitive intelligence that enterprises can use to gain a strategic advantage. Under existing approaches, to detect changes in patent trends, business managers must rely on patent analysts to compare two patent analysis charts of different time periods. The discovery of change of trends currently still needs laborious human efforts and no efficient computer-based approaches are available for helping this task. In this paper, we propose a patent trend change mining (PTCM) approach that can identify changes in patent trends without the need for specialist knowledge. The proposed approach consists of steps including patent collection, patent indicator calculation, and change detection. In change detection phase the approach firstly excavate rules between two different time periods, comparing them to determine the trend changes. These trend changes are then classified into four categories of change, evaluated with change degree and ranked by their change degree as the output information to be referred by decision makers. We apply the PTCM approach to Taiwan's semiconductor industry to discover changes in four types of patent trends: the R&D activities of a company, the R&D activities of the industry, company activities in the industry and industry activities generally. The proposed approach generates competitive intelligence to help managers develop appropriate business strategies. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.