The Study Of Patent Pre-warning In The R&D Project Management

Technology innovation has gradually become the core competitiveness and enterprises have increased the investment in R&D to keep their market positions. However, R&D is of great uncertainty, and thus risk management is an important part of project management. In previous research, studies were performed from technology, capital, politics and market without patent risk, but as an important intangible asset with both economic and technological value, patents have become effective tools for foreign enterprises to hold back Chinese enterprises. Being late starters with weak technology and few patents, Chinese enterprises are easily surrounded by patent jungle or patent traps during independent innovation, causing unnecessary loss such as high license fee and the delay of R&D. Thus it is urgent to figure out how to conduct patent pre-warning and hedging patent risk in the R&D project management.With patentometrics analysis, this thesis explore how to conduct patent pre-warning in the R&D project management. First, the research of patent pre-warning in both domestic and overseas are summarized through literature review. The framework, methods and indexes of patent pre-warning system are analyzed and analysis methods and tools are combed; after that, specific indexes are proposed from industry-oriented and competitor-oriented angles; at last, cloud computing industry is selected as research sample and analyzed.The research of industry-oriented patent pre-warning is performed based on technology life cycle and indexes are built from three aspects:general situation, key technologies and development trend analysis. Nowadays cloud computing industry in China is developing rapidly with increasing numbers of patents and promising prospect. However, its technology dependency is up to 21.6% and the technical field is narrow with lots of technology gaps. Now patents are mainly distributed in H04L0012 and H04L0029, and popular fields are private digital assistant, storage disk drive, virtual private network and memory management.In competitor-oriented analysis, the thesis suggests that competitors be divided into three types:industry leaders, catch-ups and PAEs. Industry leaders own lots of patents and have carried out patent layout on a global scale; catch-ups are late starters with few patents but high development potential, representing most of domestic enterprises and thus are the main competitors that this thesis analyze. PAEs profit from patent licensing or litigation and highly-complicated technology makes it easier to hide, which needs special attention.