How to use patent information to search potential technology partners in open innovation

With the increasing trend towards collaborations for innovation across organizational boundaries, the strategic gravity of exploring potential technology partners has been accentuated in the paradigm of open innovation. However, as the openness across nations or industries has become broad, the conventional approaches to searching external partners have encountered a number of difficulties. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a systematic approach to searching potential technology partners using patent information which is accessible from anywhere. To specify the meaning of patented inventions more specifically, the inter-relationships of words in patent documents are taken into account, instead of simple use of technological keywords. The design of the proposed approach is comprised of three consecutive steps: data collection and preprocessing, transforming patent documents into co-occurrence vectors with the aid of text mining technique and domain experts, and deriving potential technology partners via a similarity indicator. A case study of the automatic car washing technology has shown that this method has advantages over the conventional keyword-based patent analysis in terms of significance. It is believed that the suggested approach can facilitate decision making in technology partner selection, and can serve as a starting point for a more general model.