Patent Visualizations

In my work on patent research involving universities, I have used network analysis to create visualizations from relationships that result from a patent granted from the United States Patent and Trademark Office to a U.S. university. Once the relationships between key variables on a patent have been analyzed, I have created visualizations that represent key interactions between institutions and inventors listed on a given patent. This space is reserved for my visualizations of networks of people and institutions involved in patent production.

Clements, Margaret M. (2008). Thirty Years of U.S. University Patents:  Visualizing the Complex System of Institutional Collaborations. Prepared for the Networks and Complex Systems Open House at the Information Visualization Lab Open House, Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science, October 27, 2008.
The complex system of collaborations between universities and other institutions and organizations is analyzed over a thirty year period. As a self-organizing, non-random system, the network is described by power law relationships where there are a few highly connected nodes and many not so well connected nodes. It is interesting to note that the network reached complexity in the 1990-1994 time period and that the network is dissassortative in that highly connected nodes affiliate with nodes that are not so well connected.

Clements, Margaret M. and Herr, Bruce W. (2008). Co-Institution Collaboration Network on U.S. University Patents 1975-2004. Paper presented at the International Conference of Network Science 2008, June 27th, Norwich, UK.

The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act was passed into legislation to encourage technology transfer from the university laboratory into the marketplace.  Prior to 1980, universities were allowed to patent technology developed with public funds on an exceptional basis.  This legislation has resulted in the growth of university participation in marketplace activities.  Whereas university patents accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of all U.S. patents prior to 1980, university patents currently comprise 5 percent of all U.S. patents (NSB, 2006).  Furthermore, both federal funding and patents have been concentrated at a few universities for many years (Leaf, 2005; Morgan and Strickland 2001; National Science Foundation, 2005). Given this growing participation of U.S. universities in the marketplace, more should be known about the actual relationships that result in patents granted to universities because of the seeming concentration of resources. This study explores co-institutional collaboration on patents issued to U.S. universities between 1975 and 2004.  By depicting the inter-connectivity between academic institutions, commercial, governmental and international institutions, we explore the relationships between patents assigned to universities, collaborative diversity and collaborative strength of institutions participating on patents, and the importance of the patent as determined by citation strength.

Clements, Margaret M. (2008). Mapping International Institutional Relationships on U.S. University Patents. Paper prepared for the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, March 18, 2008, New York, NY.

Despite the growing relevance of United States university participation in the marketplace, little is known about the actual relationships that result in patents granted to universities.  This study explores emergent trends in international scientific collaborations involving higher education.  Revealing an expanding interconnectedness between scientific researchers, this study has important ramifications for who is participating in the creation, ownership, diffusion and control of knowledge.  This paper analyzes trends in research and development involving patents issued to United States (U.S.) universities.  Extracting patents granted to universities from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) data files, conducting a scrape of the USPTO patent server for co-assignee data and citation metrics, I conduct a network analysis of institutional and researcher collaboration on patents granted to U.S. universities between January 1, 1975 and December 31, 2004.  This network analysis reveals a highly centralized but non-randomly evolving core of institutional and individual innovators with growing external linkages to commercial, governmental, international and other domestic academic institutions and innovators within this core.

Clements, Margaret M. (2007). The Global Importance of the U.S. University Laboratory: A Network Analysis of University Patenting Activities. Paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, April 9-13, 2007, Chicago, IL.

Important trends in international scientific collaborations involving higher education are emerging that indicate an expanding interconnectedness between scientific researchers.  These trends have important ramifications for who is participating in the creation, ownership and control of knowledge.  This paper analyzes trends in research and development involving patents issued to United States (U.S.) universities.   This network analysis reveals a highly centralized core of institutional and individual innovators with growing linkages between both institutions and innovators within this core.

Clements, Margaret M., Holloway, Todd, Koh, HyunSeung, and Mutsuddi, Adity (2006). Visualizing the Landscape of U.S. University Patents at Twenty Patenting Intensive Universities. Paper presented at the NetSci 2006: International Workshop and Conference on Network Science, May 16-25, 2006, Bloomington, IN.

In this paper, we present a visualization of the demography of U.S. University patenting activities between 1969 and 2000 at twenty universities producing the highest number of patents during the same time period. Extracting patents granted to U.S. universities from the United States Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO] data sets, we analyze the data to explore the relationships between university assignee, and classification structures at sixty-five of the most highly funded universities with regard to total research expenditures as reported by the National Science Board (1).  For the purposes of this analysis, we visualize three different time frames:  1969-1980; 1981-1990; and 1991-2000 in order to understand how time and policy initiatives have impacted patenting activities at these twenty research intensive universities.