Technology Prospecting for High Tech Companies through Patent Mining

Technology prospecting is a process to evaluate the potential business values of high tech companies from the technology perspective. In this paper, we provide a new view-angle to understand technology prospecting by studying the evolving distributions of technologies in the companies. Specifically, we first exploit topic models to learn technological context in the form of probabilistic distributions of assignees and locations from large-scale patent documents. Then, we develop a matching solution to measure the relationships between patent topics and the description documents of technology terms. In this way, we can obtain the distribution of technologies for each company. In addition, we are able to assess the technology prospecting of a company by a designed indicator, which allows to compare the levels of discrepancies between the emerging technology distributions available as Garner Hype Cycles and the distribution of technologies of the company. Finally, experimental results on real-world patent data show the effectiveness of our approach for technology prospecting.