A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a country to an inventor for a limited period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention (note that the procedure for granting patents, the requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely from country to country). The disclosure of these inventions is critical to future advancements in science and technology. If carefully analyzed, patent documents can help identify emerging technologies, inspire novel solutions, foster symbiotic partnerships, and enhance overall awareness of business’ capabilities and limitations. Patent analysis is the use of analytical techniques to extract valuable knowledge from patent databases. Countries or groups of countries that maintain patent databases (e.g., the United States, the European Union, Japan) add tens of millions of new patents each year. It is nearly impossible to efficiently process such enormous amounts of semistructured data (patent documents usually contain partially structured and partially textual data). Patent analysis with semiautomated software tools is one way to ease the processing of these very large databases.

Questions for Discussion
1. Why is it important for companies to keep up with patent filings?
2. How did Kodak use text analytics to better analyze patents?
3. What were the challenges, the proposed solution, and the obtained results?