26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Standard-essential patents (SEPs) refer to officially recognized patents for an industrial standard. SEPs are crucial nevertheless not all important patents related to a standard are listed as its SEPs. In this paper, we propose a method to identify potential valuable patents which are missing from a standard’s SEP list. The method begins with expanding the scope of SEPs through a citation-based process. A citation network made of SEPs and their expanded patents is constructed and classified into clusters where each cluster contains patents with similar technologies. One then apply main paths analysis to the selected clusters to uncover significant patents for those technologies. The method allows us to observe potential valuable patents, crucial patent owners, and technological trends. The analysis results can be useful references for anyone who are active in SEP research and development, especially business leaders, R&D managers, or intellectual property participants who are involved in standard making and patent portfolio production. To demonstrate the methodology, we take high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) SEP portfolio (250 U.S. patents) declared by MPEG LA as the study case and use another HEVC patent portfolio declared by HEVC Advance as the benchmark sample. The results show that the proposed method is able to identify potential SEPs (not declared or not yet identified), or patents with technology partially related to the standards. Finally, we suggest an analysis plan to further extract critical patents from the potential valuable patents through supplementary information such as technology roadmaps, patent classifications, patent prosecutions, patent litigations, patent transactions, or patent licensing, etc..