Patents: a brief overview

Patent data form a huge silo of information about technological change.

The information available dates back at least four centuries and is available for many countries across the world.

While electronic data has generally been a more recent innovation, some countries have digitised their historical information over long periods.

The data are often available in bulk-downloadable formats at low or no cost.

Be careful, however, as there is a certain amount of learning for newcomers to the data to exploit the information contained successfully.

Patent data sets

Currently, WIER has downloaded and organised three of the most important patent data sets for use in its research:

• United States Patent and Trade Mark Office
• UK Intellectual Property Office
• European Patent Office

Details of the data available will be made available on an ongoing basis - link to follow.

Research activities

As the descriptions of the data in the Patent data set area show, the patent sources potentially enable an enormous range of research activities to draw on the structured and unstructured information content.

While the primary uses of the data relate to technologies and technological change, the WIER is combining this information with data from other sources, such as vacancy information.

The aim of doing this is to explore how new and developing areas of technology are impacting skills demand.

The current work focuses on Artificial Intelligence, but work is underway to expand this in green technologies, as well as other areas.

Details of the projects involving patent data will be made available on-going - link to follow.