Patent-based inventor profiles as a basis for human resource decisions in research and development

Abstract

Profiles of inventors' technological competence are a valuable source of information for decision‐making in research and development (R&D) management, e.g. concerning inventor assessment, human resource development and R&D team‐building. In the following exposition, a new method of inventor profiling will be put forward, which is based in particular on semantic patent analysis and multidimensional scaling. First, in the course of semantic patent analysis, specialized software, equipped with a natural language processor, reads the patent text transferring the contents into a subject–action–object–format (SAO). The extracted SAO structures are then used to create similarity matrices for patents or patent sets, respectively, according to a specific similarity value. Subsequently, an inventor competence map can be produced by means of multidimensional scaling. The benefits of this method for R&D‐related issues in human resource management will be illustrated by the example of a German mechanical engineering company. Two distinct types of profiles were generated and tested: (i) the profile of a single key inventor and (ii) a profile of key inventor sets. The single key inventor profile gives information on the range of competence, i.e. the homogeneity or heterogeneity of a certain inventor's competences, providing far more detailed insights than resorting to bibliographic data like international patent classification (IPC) classes or citations, whereas the latter kind of profile establishes the position of a certain key inventor in relation to others, helping to highlight specific groups of inventors and their domains. These results are clearly apt to support human resource management.

Investigation of Strategic Changes Using Patent Co-Inventor Network Analysis: The Case of Samsung Electronics

“…In addition, SNA techniques can derive information on corporate strategies by considering technological context information with the inventors, such as technological fields from patent classification, invention date, and assignee's business domain. Moehrle, Walter, Geritz, and Müller [16] suggested a method for supporting human resource decision making in R&D organization from the perspective of technological strategy. The research extracted researcher's technological profiles, technological knowledge, and their clusters by analyzing technological description in patents, and then they also analyzed technological context information, patent classification, and technological description of the classification, to complement the analysis results.…”

“…R&D effort-strategic resource allocation to R&D projects to improve technological capabilities in specific technological domains-is directly aligned with strategic directions of a firm, because the goal of R&D is basically to obtain technological capabilities for sustaining competitive advantage and companies never spend money on-or allocate their resources to-any business or technology that deviates from their strategic direction. From the resource-based view, intangible resources, mostly human resources, are a major determinant of a firm's decision for internal R&D and R&D human resources generally occupy the most important portion of R&D expenditure [6,9,[14][15][16][17][18][19]. Therefore, R&D human resource allocation can be a proxy variable to represent a firm's R&D efforts on specific technological domains.…”

A Function-Based Knowledge Base for Technology Intelligence

“…In this way, an SAO structure contains and represents the key concept of a system. In addition, it can express the means-end relationship in a problem-solving format; the AO states the problem to be done, and the S forms the solution (Moehrle et al, 2005). For this reason, the SAO structures found in the specification and claims of patents have been considered to represent the know-how and expertise of the inventor of a patent and may even reflect the key concepts of the invention (Bergmann et al, 2008;Yoon et al, 2013).…”

“…Moehrle et al (2005) suggested a method that profiles the technological capability of inventors for inventor assessment, human resource development, and R&D team-building. In the study, they extracted SAO structures from patents and mapped the patents onto a two-dimensional space by comparing similarities among patent SAO structures.…”

“…In particular, in design studies, the function has been one of the fundamental building blocks used to represent what a product and its component accomplish (Stone and Wood, 2000). Moreover, the functions in patent documents have been considered represent the key concepts of the inventions and the know-how and expertise of the inventors (Moehrle et al, 2005).…”