Today was the first of the two main conference days and after joining the futurists queueing for breakfast at Starbuck's (this swanky hotel has little in the way of simple, inexpensive food) I joined my first chosen session: "Patent Data as Tools for Futurists" (search this page for "patent" to see the blurb). The relevance and value of the various speakers varied, but there was some good stuff. Denise Chiavetta spoke broadly about data mining bibliographic patent data to look for patterns, and the differing ways in which the number of patents filed in a domain over time can be enlightening.
Tony Breitzman from CHI Research almost had me convinced that investments could be interesting, as he talked about how they use patents as a guide for generating a portfolio of stocks -- the number of patents a company holds, how often these are cited in other applications, etc. CHI also hold some patents on these methods themselves.
I love the idea of being able to trawl patents to spot trends, but I grudgingly realise it's not that easy. For one thing, the software to do useful stuff with the data costs. Then there are complications caused by different international patent systems (the Japanese model results in more patents than the US one for example) which it seems the OECD is hoping to remedy. And doing simple searches for phrases in emerging fields can be difficult as terms are often changing and being defined at this stage. Still, interesting stuff.
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