Exploring Potential Users of Patents for Technology Transfer: Utilizing Patent Citation Data

The purpose of this study is to examine whether potential users of technology can be identified by patent citation analysis. Previous research relied on patent's keywords, and as a consequence it was difficult to implement in practice where organizations retain huge number of patents to transfer. In this study, we attempt to use IPC instead of keywords. Our approach is to identify dominant IPC and sub-classes of an organization by applying co-classification analysis, and explore firms that cited the patents in the dominant IPC. Our view is that the organizations explored in this process can be potential users of technology. To verify our view, we examined the patents and technology transfer cases of K Research Institute's Division A. The results show that our view was right only for the field with co-classification of B01J and C07C, and it was not possible to confirm our argument for other classes. We suppose that the reasons may stem from technological characteristics and firm size effect. Therefore, we suggest that there should be further research considering technological characteristics and firm size.