EPO - Discussion forums

Hi

I am trying to measure an applicant's innovative ability by using the number of successful patents in a specific year.

it is 1)based on the family level(DOCDB_family_id)
2) identify the first time an invention is patented and call it the “original patent”.

(WHERE
granted = 1 /* there exists a publication of the grant */
AND publn_first_grant = 1 /* the first publication of grant of a given application */
AND YEAR(publn_date) NE 9999
AND publn_date>=appln_filing_date /*the publication date should later than applicantion filing date*/
GROUP BY docdb_family_id
HAVING publn_date = MIN(publn_date) /* the earliest date of publn_first_grant in each patent)


what i am confuse is how to date the patent

Should I use the appln_filing_date or the earlist_appln_date of the original patent? I think the earlist_appln_date is closer to the actual date of innovation. Could you please give me some suggestion about this?

Thanks in advance.

Hello Darwin,
most researchers will use the erliest priority date of a family as the "closest to when the invention happened".
In PATSTAT we have the attribute "earliest_filing_date" (used in tandem with the earliest_filing_id) , which is however application and not family based. In principle, one can assume that because DocDB families are based on common priorities, the "earliest one" should be the same for all DocdB family members, and this is indeed the case for 99.99 % of all families. So I would agree that the earliest earliest_filing_date is a good proxy to be be used at DocDB family level. Publication dates (of the granted family members ?): I would consider the date itself as irrelevant in this context because those dates can depend very much on the patent granting procedure and the technical complexity of the patent claims. You could however use the fact that at least 1 family member has been granted as a proxy for the "succes of the family". Some researcher use even more strict conditions such as : the family should have a granted family member in the US, EP and JP. This is comparable to the "triadic patent family concept " from the OECD.
https://data.oecd.org/rd/triadic-patent-families.htm

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

But I do not find the proxy for the "succes of the family". (I am using the 2016 Autumn edition) could you please tell me which attribute it is ?

thanks in advance.

Hello Darwin,
I meant, you can use the fact that 1 application belonging to a family has been granted as a proxy for "success of the family".
There is no such pre-aggregated attribute ready made in PATSTAT; this is something users can do themselves.

Here is a short query that gives for a set of families the earliest application date, the number of family members, and a flag whether or not the family contains an application that was granted. For complex analysis on large sets of data; you might have to consider to have a local PATSTAT Global installation.