Applying an anchor based patent mapping approach: Basic conception and the case of carbon fiber reinforcements

•Patent mapping is an important tool for strategic decisions.•We use an anchor based approach for the analysis of technological convergence.•The anchor points are based on semantic analysis of patent texts.•Our approach allows the examination of a technology's motion patterns.•We demonstrate our approach with the case of carbon fiber reinforcements.

Patent mapping is an important method for analyzing technological patterns both for scientific research and strategic tasks in companies. In this paper we focus on a specific type of technological pattern, namely the analysis of patents' positions in relation to predefined positions of application fields. For this purpose we use an anchoring approach. We apply semantic patent measurement and discuss RadViz as a powerful method to visualize the measurement's results and to provide insightful motion patterns for monitoring technology change. Moreover, we present an algorithm to define so called anchor points as high dimensional reference points by using textual elements of patents. By the example of carbon fiber reinforcements we demonstrate the usefulness of our approach. Thus, our approach enables academics to analyze important types of technological patterns like convergence or divergence by means of a new instrument and gives practitioners like the R&D management of companies the opportunity to build a reliable strategic business decision support.

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