Through analysis of millions of patents, a Danish research team has elucidated the importance of describing the innovation under patenting accurately. When an imbalance exists between the scope of protection and the innovation described or if the patents are unclearly written, barriers to future technological development may be created.
“Our findings are important for researchers and practitioners because they show how crucial it is to balance the patent description with the scope of protection. Our results suggest that even small imbalances in the initial application can have a big impact and can potentially affect innovation,” says Assistant Professor Marek Giebel, Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), heading the project.
The analysis was based on a dataset of over 4.5 million patents and related applications from the US Patent and Trademark Office between 2001 and 2022.
The project involved the processing of massive text files, sometimes up to 47 GB per year. This requires computational resources beyond what is possible on standard systems. Therefore, Marek Giebel approached DeiC – the national research and education network (NREN) of Denmark. The program DeiC Interactive HPC assists researchers wanting to get started on high-performance computing (HPC).
Photo: Assistant Professor Marek Giebel from the Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School. Credit: Jakob Boserup.
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Submitted by Morten Anderson
