• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.161-179
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• 2016

The recent patent wars in the information technology (IT) industry demonstrate the strategic importance of IT patents in the industry. In this paper, we adopt the lens of real options to study the value of IT patents for IT firms. Specifically, we examine the relationship between IT patents and firms' market performance. We also consider the moderating effect of the innovation orientation of firms' patent portfolios (exploitative vs. explorative). Based on a large panel dataset consisting of 697 firms in US IT industries, our results suggest that the impact of IT patents on firm value (as measured by Tobin's q) is positive and significant. Further, we find that this impact varies, depending on the innovation orientation of firms' patent portfolios. IT patent portfolios with higher levels of an exploitative orientation are associated with higher firm value, compared to those with a lower exploitative orientation. This study highlights the value of employing real options theory as the underlying mechanism in understanding the impact of patents on firm valuation. Future researchers can adopt the real options lens to identify and empirically examine the role of other factors that may affect the value of patents and other investments exhibiting real option characteristics. While our paper answers some questions about the value of patents in the IT industry, it also raises a number of additional new questions. As such, we hope that it will generate more research on this important topic.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.81-89
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• 2018

Patents have been recognized as a core knowledge asset which are closely related with company's technological competitiveness. However, only a small portion of patents are actually contributing to the profit of the company. In addition, it costs a lot of money continuously to maintain the patent rights regardless of their values. Thus, effective methodologies are required to create patents with high values. It is examined what kind of differences exist between high value patents and the others in the use of TRIZ methodologies. For the purpose, we analyzed the US granted patents of Samsung Electronics. The analysis shows that there is no significant difference in the use of inventive principles, but high value patents utilize 'separation by condition' the most where as the others 'separation by space' the most frequently in the use of separation principles. In the use of standard solutions, high value patents use the 'class 2' principles frequently than the others.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.447-454
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• 2015

Objective: The purposes of this study are to survey general and ergonomics relevant patents of major foreign countries, to classify the ergonomics patents into some categories frequently found in the patents lists surfed and to compare the results with those of Korea. Background: Under today's severe competitions between countries and between companies, the intellectual property has never been more important. It is needed to investigate Korea's positions and worldwide status of patent applications and grants for general and ergonomics patents. Method: This study was mainly based on relevant websites surfing such as KIPRIS, FPO, EPO, WIPO, etc. Results: The results showed that while Korea placed fourth in patent applications and grants in 2012, following US, Japan and China, Korea ranked seventh in the number of ergonomics patents. Of the overseas ergonomics patents, the proportion of tool/device was the second highest to category of others, followed by chair/desk, grip/handle and keyboard, etc. Compared to the overseas ergonomics patents, Korea showed a slightly different trend that there were less patents for specific fields of ergonomics such as grip/handle, keyboard, tool/device, etc. Conclusion: The number of ergonomics patents of Korea was behind most foreign countries surveyed in the number of patent applications and grants of, and there were many categories of overseas ergonomics patents. Application: This study would be used as a reference or guideline when developing varying ergonomic products or applying to ergonomics patents.

• The Korean Journal of Food And Nutrition
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.261-271
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• 2009

Deep sea water exists at depths of over 200m under the sea. As no sunlight reaches it, photosynthesis does not take place within it, and it contains no organic matter. In addition, its temperature is maintained at a stable low level throughout the year, so it does not get mixed with the sea water on the surface. It contains a large amount of nutritious salts, whose cleanness is maintained. It is a marine resource that has matured for a long period of time. Research into deep sea water, which started in the 1970s, has been made around the whole world, including the USA and Japan. In Korea, research has been active in this area since 2000. As there has been a good amount of research into industrial applications for deep sea water, since 1993, patents for the relevant technologies have been applied. This paper intends to provide a resource to researchers of deep sea water, by summarizing of all domestic deep sea water-related patents applied with Korean Intellectual Property Office from 1993 to 2008. This research was conducted using a computer and KIPRIS Database owned by the Korea Institute of Patent Information. 'Deep sea water' was used as the search keyword. A total of 222 Korean patents relating to deep sea water have been registered on the basis of IPC. Of these, 126 patents relate to the manufacturing and the treatment of foods, foodstuffs, or non-alcoholic beverages(A23L), while 50 patents relate to the production for medical, dental, or cosmetic purposes(A61K). 38 patents relate to water purification, treatment of wastewater, sewage and sludge (C02F), while 8 patents relate to fishery and farming(A01K). In summary, it was found that studies for the practical use of deep sea water have been conducted in relation to the manufacturing and the treatment of foods, foodstuffs, beverages, and cosmetics.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.129-142
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• 2018

Recently, the number of patent applications have been increasing rapidly every year as the importance of protecting intellectual property rights becomes more important. Patents must be inventive and have novelty. Especially, the novelty implies that the corresponding invention is not the same as the previous invention. To confirm the novelty, prior art search must be conducted before and after the application. The target of prior art search should include not only Korean patents but also foreign patents. Search of foreign patents should be supported by multilingual search techniques. However, a dictionary-based naive approach shows a limitation because some technical concepts are represented in different terms according to each nation. For example, a Korean term and a Japanese term may not be synonym even though they represent the same technical concept. In this paper, we propose a new method to map semantic similarity between technical terms in Korean patents and Japanese patents. To investigate different representations in each nation for the same technical concept, we identified and analyzed pairs of patents those are mutually connected with priority claim relationship. By performing an experiment with real-world data, we showed that our approach can reveal semantically similar technical terms in other language successfully.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.271-274
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• 2012

Whereas a vast amount of new information on bioinformatics is made available to the public through patents, only a small set of patents are cited in academic papers. A detailed analysis of registered bioinformatics patents, using the existing patent search system, can provide valuable information links between science and technology. However, it is extremely difficult to select keywords to capture bioinformatics patents, reflecting the convergence of several underlying technologies. No single word or even several words are sufficient to identify such patents. The analysis of patent subclasses can provide valuable information. In this paper, I did a preliminary study of the current status of bioinformatics patents and their International Patent Classification (IPC) groups registered in the Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service (KIPRIS) database.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.33-52
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• 2020

Patents are widely used in the literature as a measure of firm-level innovation. It is regarded that patents improve a firm's operational environment and ultimately increase the value of the firm. However, the relationship between patents and firm value in Korea is under-explored in the literature due to the difficulty of constructing datasets. This paper examines whether patents in Korea increase the market value of a firm. To do this, I exploit novel data on firm-level patents and financial information of all listed Korean companies during the period of 1993-2015 and estimate the non-linear production-function type of Tobin's q equations on R&D, patents, and citations. Surprisingly, I find that patents and citations are weakly associated with firm value, while R&D is strongly associated with an increase in firm value. These results direct imply that policymakers in Korea should enhance patenting incentives to encourage firms to innovate.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.53-77
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• 2015

Korea has witnessed an increasing number of domestic patent applications, but a majority of them are not utilized to their maximum potential but end up becoming obsolete. According to the 2012 National Congress' Inspection of Administration, about 73% of patents possessed by universities and public-funded research institutions failed to lead to creating social values, but remain latent. One of the main problem of this issue is that patent creators such as individual researcher, university, or research institution lack abilities to commercialize their patents into viable businesses with those enterprises that are in need of them. Also, for enterprises side, it is hard to find the appropriate patents by searching keywords on all such occasions. This system proposes a patent recommendation system that can identify and recommend intellectual rights appropriate to users' interested fields among a rapidly accumulating number of patent assets in a more easy and efficient manner. The proposed system extracts core contents and technology sectors from the existing pool of patents, and combines it with secondary social knowledge, which derives from tags information created by users, in order to find the best patents recommended for users. That is to say, in an early stage where there is no accumulated tag information, the recommendation is done by utilizing content characteristics, which are identified through an analysis of key words contained in such parameters as 'Title of Invention' and 'Claim' among the various patent attributes. In order to do this, the suggested system extracts only nouns from patents and assigns a weight to each noun according to the importance of it in all patents by performing TF-IDF analysis. After that, it finds patents which have similar weights with preferred patents by a user. In this paper, this similarity is called a "Domain Similarity". Next, the suggested system extract technology sector's characteristics from patent document by analyzing the international technology classification code (International Patent Classification, IPC). Every patents have more than one IPC, and each user can attach more than one tag to the patents they like. Thus, each user has a set of IPC codes included in tagged patents. The suggested system manages this IPC set to analyze technology preference of each user and find the well-fitted patents for them. In order to do this, the suggeted system calcuates a 'Technology_Similarity' between a set of IPC codes and IPC codes contained in all other patents. After that, when the tag information of multiple users are accumulated, the system expands the recommendations in consideration of other users' social tag information relating to the patent that is tagged by a concerned user. The similarity between tag information of perferred 'patents by user and other patents are called a 'Social Simialrity' in this paper. Lastly, a 'Total Similarity' are calculated by adding these three differenent similarites and patents having the highest 'Total Similarity' are recommended to each user. The suggested system are applied to a total of 1,638 korean patents obtained from the Korea Industrial Property Rights Information Service (KIPRIS) run by the Korea Intellectual Property Office. However, since this original dataset does not include tag information, we create virtual tag information and utilized this to construct the semi-virtual dataset. The proposed recommendation algorithm was implemented with JAVA, a computer programming language, and a prototype graphic user interface was also designed for this study. As the proposed system did not have dependent variables and uses virtual data, it is impossible to verify the recommendation system with a statistical method. Therefore, the study uses a scenario test method to verify the operational feasibility and recommendation effectiveness of the system. The results of this study are expected to improve the possibility of matching promising patents with the best suitable businesses. It is assumed that users' experiential knowledge can be accumulated, managed, and utilized in the As-Is patent system, which currently only manages standardized patent information.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.38-47
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• 2013

We examine whether the attributes of patented knowledge have any impact on its chances of commercialization. It has been hypothesized that the scope and cumulativeness of patented knowledge would positively affect the likelihood of its commercialization. The hypotheses were tested using patents data on the US biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. We found support for the prediction that the scope of patented knowledge increases the likelihood of commercialization, but we didn't find support for the cumulativeness aspect. These findings have important implications for firms that develop patentable knowledge, license-out patents, license-in patents from external sources, or debate about patenting strategy.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.1-28
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• 2017

Today, according to the increased importance of industry-university cooperation in the knowledge-based economy, support and the number of researches involved in industry-university cooperation has also steadily increased. But it is true that profits from the outcome of patents resulting from such cooperation, such as technology transfer and royalty fees, are lower than they are supposed to be, because of excessive patents applications, although some of them have little commercial potential. Therefore, this research aims to suggest a way to analyze and recognize patents, which enable efficient industry-university cooperation and technology transfer. For the analysis, data on 1,061 patents was collected from 4 different universities. With the data, a quality-strategy matrix was arranged targeting the industry-university cooperation foundations', US patents owned by universities, text mining, and social network analysis were carried out, particularly focusing on the patents in the advanced quality technology section of the matrix. Then core key words and IPC codes were obtained and key patents were analyzed by universities. As a result of the analysis, it was found that 4 key patents, 2 key IPC codes were drawn for University H, 4 key patents, 2 key IPC codes for University K, 6 key patents, 1 key IPC code for University Y, 14 key patents, and 2 key IPC codes for University S. This research is expected to have a great significance in contributing to the invigoration of industry-university cooperation based on the analysis result on patents and IPC codes, which enable efficient industry-university cooperation and technology transfer.