Patent Deployment Based on a Network Perspective

Abstract

專利屬於企業研發投入中較易被量化的一種知識產出，利用專利分析可以評估公司無形資產的價值。近年來許多專利分析大都偏向專利指標的衡量。有別於以往的研究，本研究嘗試利用社會網絡的概念與小世界網絡模型，針對TFT-LCD產業專利引用網絡進行分析。結果顯示，專利引用網絡為小世界網絡，其小世界網絡特性十分顯著。另外本研究從專利被引用、專利引用他人專利、專利總連結數三方觀察，發現不論何種型態的連結次數分布均呈現冪次分自己的型態;若從專利引用次數的成長趨勢來看，我們也可以看出專利的引用具有偏好，也就是說某些專利對於產業技術而言是發展的主流。最後我們針對具有高中介性的專利也就是專利引用網絡中的弱述結做測試，發現的75%的專利引用行為都與中介性高的專利有闕，當我們去掉這些專利之後會有50.6%的專利知識符不到交流。

The patent is an indicator of research and development output that can be quantitatively analyzed. A patent analysis can be utilized to evaluate the value of a firm's intangible assets. Up to now, patent-index methods have been widely adopted by various researchers for patent-related analyses. Unlike those, this study attempts to use the social network concept and small-world network behavior to analyze the TFT-LCD patent citation networks. The study shows that the patent citation network can be fully characterized by using the small-world model. We also analyze the number of upstream and downstream citations and discover that the number of patent citations is distributed according to the power law. When investigating patent citation growth, we also notice that patent citations are highly selective. In other words, only a few patents represent the mainstream of industry development. Finally, we validate the importance of patents with high betweenness centrality and discover that 63.75% of patent citations are closely related to them. When the patents with high betweenness centrality are removed from the citation network, 50.6% of patent technical information ceases to flow.