The use of patent analysis in foresight, insights and assessments of methods and approaches

The analysis of patent data is an ongoing challenge. During the last 20 years, the digitalization of patents has enabled researchers and intellectual property professionals to search and evaluate patents and patent portfolios more efficiently and the field of patentometrics emerged. Since patents also reflect technological advances and the advent of possible applications, they are an important source for data driven foresight, the scientific field of gathering insight into the future by analysing data (publications, patents, social media etc.). So far, either qualitative or quantitative reviews on the use of patent data for foresight have been carried out. In this research I will present a combination of both types of analysis to determine which methods are used and how they can be evaluated. To do so, a set of scientific publications which was established in (Martini and John, 2022), will be analysed regarding the use case, method and data field used. This results in a structured overview. Additionally, the results will be enriched by adding the publications metadata. Since it is often missed out on the assessment and comparison of scientific methods, the goal will be to close this research gap for the aforementioned research topic and to deliver a base on which new methods can be assessed. To do so, bibliometric properties of the respective work will be combined with the thematic classification. This approach, which can be seen as a use case-driven, bibliometric-enhanced, systematic review, can then also be transferred to other research fields.