Quantifying patent commercialisation to support engineering design

该项目将研究众包是否可以用于聚合互联网上不同的开放数据源的内容，以确定哪些专利支撑着商业产品，并根据技术标准以适合工程设计的可视化“画廊”形式组织和展示这些专利。专利经常用于量化与特定地区或公司相关的创新水平。然而，尽管开发了复杂的数据挖掘工具来支持对5000多万在线专利记录的分析，但人们对哪些专利实际上被“商业化”以及它们如何体现在商业产品中知之甚少。正因为如此，“专利信息学”本质上局限于对知识产权（IP）的记录而不是使用的研究。这种信息差距不可避免地降低了学术和商业分析的准确性，这些分析将专利数据用于创新研究、研发前瞻和知识产权组合估值等应用。此外，现有数据图的呈现形式在概念化和具体化产品时对工程设计师来说并不有用：它主要是基于文本的（并且经常故意混淆），而在进行工程设计开发时，带有范例和适当的技术分类术语的更直观的呈现将大大提高实用性。众包利用开放人员的大型网络来完成离散任务。虚拟工具被用来协调结果的分配、支付和协调，从而形成了一个全天候开放的劳动力市场，以及一个可以快速、廉价地执行任务的多样化劳动力市场。人类工作者的分布式网络提供了在线的“黑匣子”推理能力，在灵活性和范围方面可能远远超过当前人工智能技术（即遗传算法，神经网络，基于案例的推理）的能力。该项目提出，可以利用众包访问开放数据源，如用户手册、产品标签、法院诉讼和公司网页，以了解哪些专利在当前产品中被积极使用，以及这些专利是如何体现的。通过更准确地表示创新商业化、技术元数据（标签）和利用率，我们认为专利搜索不是一个阶段性的检查，而是一个重新焕发活力的设计灵感来源。事实上，如果众包被证明是一种廉价、可扩展的方式来整理这些信息，并应用适当的分类和视觉工程信息，它可能会从根本上改变工程设计的早期阶段。为此，该项目将产生一个可视化工具，可用于指导和激发设计概念化和具体化。

This project will investigate if crowdsourcing can be used to aggregate the content of disparate, open-data sources across the internet to determine which patents underpin commercial products, and organise and present these according to technical criteria in a visual "gallery" form appropriate for engineering design.Patents are frequently used to quantify levels of innovation associated with specific regions or companies. However despite the development of sophisticated data mining tools to support the analysis of over 50 million online patent records, little is known about which patents are actually "commercialized" and how they are embodied in commercial products. Because of this "patent informatics" has been inherently limited to the study of the records, rather than the use, of Intellectual Property (IP). This information gap inevitably reduces the accuracy of academic and commercial analysis that use patent data for applications such as innovation research, R&D fore-sighting, and IP portfolio valuations. Furthermore, the presentation of existing data maps is not in a form that is useful for engineering designers when conceptualising and embodying products: it is predominantly text-based (and often deliberately obfuscated) when more visual presentation with exemplars and appropriate technical taxonomic terms would greatly enhance utility when undertaking engineering design development.Crowdsourcing utilises large networks of open people to compete discrete tasks. Virtual tools are used to co-ordinate the distribution, payment and co-ordination of results, resulting in a labour market that is open 24/7 and a diverse workforce available to perform tasks quickly and cheaply. The distributed network of human workers provide on-line, "black-box", reasoning capabilities that could far exceed the capabilities of current AI technologies (i.e. genetic algorithms, neural-nets, case-based reasoning) in terms of flexibility and scope. This project proposes that crowdsourcing can be utilised to access open data sources such as user manuals, product labelling, court proceedings and company web pages to understand which patents are actively used in current products and how they have been embodied. With a more accurate representation of innovation commercialisation, technical metadata (labelling), and utilisation, we envisage patent searches not as a stage-gate check but as a revitalised source of design inspiration. Indeed, if crowdsourcing proves a cheap, scalable way of collating this information and applying appropriate taxonomic and visual engineering information, it could fundamentally alter the early phases of engineering design. To this end, the project will result in a visualization tool that can be used to both guide and inspire design conceptualisation and embodiment.