Through analysis of millions of patents, a Danish research team has elucidated the importance of describing the innovation under patenting accurately. When an imbalance exists between the scope of protection and the innovation described or if the patents are unclearly written, barriers to future technological development may be created.
“Our findings are important for researchers and practitioners because they show how crucial it is to balance the patent description with the scope of protection. Our results suggest that even small imbalances in the initial application can have a big impact and can potentially affect innovation,” says Assistant Professor Marek Giebel, Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), heading the project.
The analysis was based on a dataset of over 4.5 million patents and related applications from the US Patent and Trademark Office between 2001 and 2022.
Supercomputing was a gamechanger
The project involved the processing of massive text files, sometimes up to 47 GB per year. This requires computational resources beyond what is possible on standard systems. Therefore, Marek Giebel approached DeiC – the national research and education network (NREN) of Denmark. The program DeiC Interactive HPC assists researchers wanting to get started on high-performance computing (HPC).
The support staff at CBS’ library and research management team assisted the researcher, guiding him through the HPC application process and providing support.
“Using DeiC Interactive HPC has been a gamechanger for this project. The processing power allowed us to perform multiple types of in-depth analysis, from large-scale text processing to complex statistical modelling, and this enabled us to identify patterns and insights in the data material, that we otherwise couldn’t have found,” explains Marek Giebel.
Ready to expand the scope
The main part of the project was carried out in 2023 and 2024, while initial tests and data preparations started in 2022.
In total, the team used 89,000 core hours for computations.
As he continues his research, Marek Giebel remains open to scaling up his computational resources to accommodate future analyses. His next steps may involve including earlier patent cohorts before 2001 and examining additional aspects of patent documents, such as figures, which will further enhance the breadth of his findings.
The text is inspired by the article “HPC uncovers how patent precision affects innovation” by Anne Rahbek-Damm at the DeiC website.
Photo: Assistant Professor Marek Giebel from the Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School. Credit: Jakob Boserup.
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