Techonology Mapping Using Patents Literature for Supply Chain Management

Business methods and software were not considered subject of the patent grants till late nineties. However for last few years US Patent office and some other offices are granting patents in these areas. Over the year patent literature has become a rich source of information and can be utilized to understand technology mobility and classification. In this paper we present technology mapping for Supply Chain using patent literature. The methodology involved development of software tool for converting patent documents in a database and development of software tools for classification of documents into subclasses of the technology using text mining tools such as probit regression, similarity matching and threshold indices. About 5000 patent documents related to supply chain management are analyzed for this purpose.