Quality Improves the Value of Patent Information to Promote Innovation

Abstract

Information, a tool to reduce uncertainty and develop knowledge in organizations, is an important aid in the decision making process. There are several characteristics that describe the quality of information that will allow the analysis of its value. Quality information warrants us best results when competing with other organizations. Its value is related to the results that it will allow us to obtain, and it depends on the context. Patent information must be of high quality to permit the search and retrieval of the documents needed to solve a problem or stimulate new ideas and solutions. Old inventions can generate new ideas; technologies for one application can be introduced for a new domain and can be applied in ecologically sustainable solutions. The current high number of patent applications reduces the quality of patent information due to the time needed to filter and search for all the prior art available. Some standards, together with machine translation, have been set up to avoid this situation and improve the quality of the patent information retrieved by the interested public. A comprehensive survey of the relevant literature available made us aware that commercial databases supply some value-added information to help the researchers and improve the efficiency of the search queries. Some of these features could be applied by the national and international intellectual property offices.