Patent Analysis in Assessing Supply Chain Management Innovation

Patent documents record the nature of the invention and the direction of the technological development. Patent analysis refers to statistical techniques used to examine the information contained in a patent document. In this study, we assessed patents on supply chain management(SCM) to examine the research and development for SCM. The search time starts from January 1st, 1999 to December 31st, 2012. One hundred and twenty patents on SCM were collected from KIPRIS(Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service) database. The research analyzed patent counts, inventor analysis, assignees analysis, and International Patent Classification(IPC) analysis. The result of this study indicated that the number of patents is increasing continuously and most patents are invented by multiple inventors with corporation assignees.