EPO - Discussion forums

Hi guys!


I realise that this forum might not be entirely relatable, but I will give try post my query here.

For my master thesis, I want to research how the knowledge overlap of the acquiring and target firm affects post-deal innovative performance of the acquiring firm. When considering knowledge, I will consider both quantity and quality. Quantity will be the number of patents shared between the firms with the same patent code, where quality will be the number of forward citations.

I thus need firm-level patent data for the sample of around 200 firms, including their classification and number of forward citations. I would to use USPTO data, but EPO data would probably be fine too (I realise this is an EPO forum)

Any tips on how to proceed? Is anyone aware of any such dataset publicly available? I have looked through some datasets but none really match my need.

I should note that I don't have PATSTAT installed, and don't think my university offers it. However, I saw there is an online version?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Hello chrisparfitt,
the PATSTAT data base should contain the data you are looking for, but you will need to extract it.
There are no " ready to use" data sets according to your needs.
Have a look at the PATSTAT webpage: http://www.epo.org/searching-for-patent ... html#tab-1; you can obtain a 1 month free account, which in your case might be sufficient to extract the data (at least if your 200 companies are not to top patent filers.)
Also have a look at the documentation and self learning modules, as well as the forum posts.
Your first hurdle will be to "match" the names of your 200 companies with the possible variations used by those companies when the file patents. You have to keep in mind that "ownership changes" are mostly NOT recorded in patent registers. Once you have the names matched, then you can rather easily extract a data base (or table) which you then can use to carry out your final analysis.
If you give me the names of a couple of your companies, then I can explain a bit more in detail.