Visual Thinking and Communication Tools - Patent Maps

Patent mapping is a tool for representing complex patent landscapes, i.e., creating actionable intelligence. According to the Paual Germeraad, former VP of Research, Avery Dennison, “Frankly, it’s beyond me why any company in this day and age would even attempts to do R&D without the insights that patent mapping gives you. It’s like trying to navigate your company’s future blind without a map”.

Maps are graphical representation of various information's gathered from a variety of sources. Map communication is the component of thematic mapping, the purpose of which is to represent one of the many possible results of the knowledge base. Maps are tools for the researcher and patent professional in finding and representing patterns and relationships among mapped data. Making association is an important part of our thinking. We make connection all the time. This ability is of great importance in the area of patents.

Rational patent mapping is defined as interpretive distillation of large amount of often complex and unorganized data into one or more high value representations useful in making business decisions. Patent mapping is based on clustering, aggregation and other operations to extract the technological value from patents to highlight specific features and provide insights on technological developments in a particular technological domain.

There are no preset limits to the kinds of representation. This make patent mapping as much as art as science, because it has to be ensured that these representations can fulfill the role of a knowledge tool rather than visual tools.