Software-based patent analysis: How to leverage a text-mining tool

Within the early phases of technology management processes, patents are often used as a source of inspiration for new ideas. Patents contain detailed technical information about a technical problem and the preferred technical solution. This information can be used for example to assess the state of the art or as a basis to identify possible gaps in a technology field. But often it is a very time consuming process to analyse the information provided by patents, because huge amounts of patents have to be considered. Therefore special text-mining tools are used to help extracting the desired information in short time. One common text-mining tool that is appropriate to assist the information extraction from patents is Luxid®. In the following a special approach to retrieve problems and solutions from patents that are needed to conduct a White Spot Analysis by using Luxid® is presented. The main advantage of this approach is that the user need not read whole patent documents but is able to retrieve the relevant parts of the text in short time for further analysis steps.