System for automatic entrepreneurial complementarity search through patents data bases

The model of Open Innovation is the best choice to the firms that can not afford research and development (R&D) costs but intent continues playing the innovation game. This model offers to any firm the companies spread worldwide and in all research fields as possible partners in R&D. However, the possible partnership can not be restricted in the manager´s know-who. The patent documents can be the source of rich information about technical development and innovation from a huge amount of firms. Search through all these documents created daily is a cumbersome task that technology managers can not afford. This paper aims to introduce an automated model to seek for matching between firms´ R&D using Data Mining techniques applied into patents documents datasets. The methodology considers the search for patents documents from possible partners and these data treatment through Association technique between IPC fields in the patents. An evaluation system was implemented, one example experiment was made and the results it reaches are patterns of technological knowledge interdependence that can be used to evaluate the complementarity between firms.