Patent Landscaping Applications
in Academic Research
Invention – Case Study
Napoléon is a driving force for invention of Can
French military and political leader, Napoléon Bonaparte, is widely credited as
being the driving force behind the invention of the can.
In 1795, the French Military had a problem in need of a solution – long, vulnerable
food supply lines.
There was no effective method at this time for the preservation of food,
transportation of food was difficult, and as many soldiers were dying from
malnutrition and starvation as from enemy fire.
Napoleon offered a 12,000 franc prize to any inventor who could devise a cheap
and effective method for preserving large amounts of food.
It took over ten years for progress to be made.
In 1806, Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner and brewer discovered that food cooked inside
a jar did not spoil unless the seals leaked, and developed a method for sealing food in glass
jars.
This was a huge breakthrough – for the first time in history food could be preserved without
obliterating its texture and destroying its taste.
However, the process was slow and glass containers also presented issues for transportation.
Unfortunately for the French army, the war ended before the process was perfected.
An Englishman who learned of making cans and patented his ideas.
Tin cans were preferable to glass jars as they were cheaper to produce and
much easier to transport.
Incredibly, each large can was hand-made, making the process labour-
intensive and slow – even the best workman could only produce up to 60
cans a day.
Additionally, the food could take up-to six hours to cook making this a very
expensive process – too expensive for ordinary people.
The main market for the food at this stage was the British Army and Royal
Navy.
Can openers had not yet been invented so soldiers used to open tins with
their bayonets or, failing that, smash them open with rocks.
Developments in can manufacturing started to come thick and fast
in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.
In 1846 a gentleman called Henry Evans invented a die device that
enabled production of cans to increase from a rate of 6 to 60 cans
per hour (a far cry from what can be produced today, but still a
good effort!)
The first automatic can-making machinery was introduced in
Britain in the late 19th Century, securing the tin can’s future in the
preservation and packaging of food.
It wasn’t until 1930 that technology had advanced to the stage where beverages could be packaged in
cans.
Beer was available in cans from 1935 – closely followed by sodas, with their higher acidity and higher
pressures.
The key development for storing beverages in cans was the interior liner, typically plastic or sometimes
a waxy substance, that helped to keep the product’s flavour from being ruined by a chemical reaction
with the metal.
The popularity of canned beverages was slow to catch on, as the metallic taste was difficult to
overcome with the interior liner not perfected, especially with the more acidic sodas.
The first flat-top can appeared for sale in Richmond, Virginia.
These cans were factory sealed and required a special opener called a ‘churchkey’ to
consume the contents.
As shown in the advertisement, can manufacturer Schlitz were pretty pleased with
themselves when they developed the ‘soft-top’ can with an aluminium lid for easier
opening.
You still needed to use the churchkey, but apparently it required a lot less effort. “Some day
all beer cans will open this easy!” – indeed!
The Ring-Pull Invention
Schlitz drinker Fraze, who was known as Ernie, took up the can problem in 1959 when, while
picnicking with family and friends, he realized he had no opener.
Fraze made do using a car bumper, but thought: "There must be a better way.“
Fraze, who'd grown up on a livestock and alfalfa farm outside Muncie, had started a tool and die
shop, Dayton Reliable Tool and Manufacturing Co., in 1949 with the help of an $800 loan from his
wife, Martha, a secretary.
For months Fraze was the sole employee, and for a while he milled Cracker Jack prizes to get by.
By the time he started pondering the self-opening can, he had customers in several industries.
The Ring-Pull
Terry Fraze demurred when asked how much his
family had made from the self-opening can.
One clue is that Dayton Reliable Tool reported
$50 million in revenue and had 500 employees in
1980, when it was supplying much of the world
with can-end machinery.
More information
Today, over 280 billion beverage cans are manufactured worldwide each
year.
The future technological advancements in beverage can manufacturing include
experimenting with materials to keep beverages cool;
LED technology on cans to display things like football results, and the inclusion of
Near-Field-Communication (NFC) technology which works as a promotional aid in
conjunction with smartphones.
Licensing activity
Licensing is very helpful to small company while
dealing with bigger company having leverage in
negotiations.
Licensing IP can be tremendously profitable
IBM 1.7 billion US $
Texas Instruments 500 million US$
Stanford university 36.9 million US$
PATENT LANDSCAPING
Patent Landscaping of Drone
Patents Landscaping of Electric Vehicle
Introduction
• Electric vehicles (EV) embrace a huge range of technologies including
vehicle architecture, new components, e.g., electric motors, batteries,
etc., and new infrastructure, e.g., related to charging.
• Those working in rapidly expanding, active technological fields such
as electric vehicle technologies have to make decisions at an early
stage when developing new products, taking into account the
activities of the worldwide competitors.
• They also have to identify, early on with a high degree of certainty
which innovations are real, in order to avoid financing projects that
have no future.
• Patenting is a key element of the innovation strategy for industrial
players.
• As a counterweight the inventions are made available to the public in
the form of published applications disclosing the invention,
embodiments of the invention, and the scope of the claimed
protection.
• An early search in patent databases can reveal similar work, and help
companies avoid duplicating work already done elsewhere.
• Analyzing worldwide patenting activity can allow innovators to
identify growth areas, and niches of opportunity, and it can highlight
competitors' R&D behavior.
Relevant classification codes for electric vehicles (EV)
• In this presentation, the following classification codes have been considered using the
CPC scheme as well as the IPC scheme:
• B60L, B60K6/20 and B60W20. The study is thus considering most of the patent
applications relating to propulsion of purely electric, hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles,
as well as patent applications of other electric vehicle (EV) specific components including
charging equipment.
• The study is also, in part, considering patent applications relating to batteries, as long as
the focus of the invention is on the integration of these batteries in the electric vehicles.
• Batteries in general are covered by other CPC and IPC classification codes, which are not
used for this analysis. These covered technological fields will be referred to in the rest of
the article as “EV fields”.
• More precisely NACE 2 code 29 – Manufacture of Motor Vehicles, Trailers and Semi-
Trailers – is used to cover the whole automotive sector. Finally, classification code F02B
(CPC and IPC) is used as representative of innovations in combustion engines.
Identification of the most active technological
fields inside of the EV fields
• The chart in Figure previous slide offers a detailed analysis of the
patenting activity in parts of the relevant technological fields in and
around electric vehicles.
• Starting with normalised data for 1990, the red areas show above-
average patenting activity in a given year, and the blue areas show
below average patenting activity; the deeper the colour, the greater
the deviation is from the average.
• Activity in the development of parallel and series-parallel type hybrid
vehicles or lithium batteries for example, is above average.
• The "cool" areas include for example development of mechanical
energy device storages.
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