Consolidating firm portfolios of patents across different offices. A comparison of sectoral distribution of patenting activities in Europe and Japan

This paper describes a methodology for the construction of a novel patent dataset for computing consolidated patent portfolios across patent offices. In particular, relying on two previous contributions – the EPIP database for EPO/PCT patents and the IIP patent database for JPO patent documents – we discuss how to integrate the applicant names of these two databases with the mean of priority information from PATSTAT. This methodology yields significant improvements in the harmonization of applicants name for European firms in IIP patent database and Japanese firms in EPIP database. The paper concludes with a first look to the differences in patenting strategy by European and Japanese firms.