In order to stimulate research and development in their companies, managers and technical experts might aim at identifying frugal patents from third parties by means of advanced text mining techniques. The same may be true for scientists who wish to improve their understanding of frugal inventions.

In “Finding frugal patent candidates: testing a thesaurus-based process model in the field of small household appliances” we tested a process model and identified a number of 22 strongly frugal patent candidates, which are manually evaluated based on three frugal characteristics. Due to this analysis, a high fraction of the candidates could be identified as frugal patents, which validates the process model.

“Stimulating R&D by finding frugal patents: A process model and a comparison between different evaluation methods“ has recently been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. In this paper, we present a process model applying different text-mining methods, namely search string refinement and topic modeling, in the evaluation step. We show that a hybrid solution may be effective in identifying frugal patent candidates while reducing manual efforts for evaluation at the same time.

Kronemeyer, Lena L.; Draeger, Raik; Moehrle, Martin G. (2021): Finding frugal patent candidates: testing a thesaurus-based process model in the field of small household appliances. In International Journal of Innovation Science, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJIS-04-2020-0052

Kronemeyer, Lena L.; Draeger, Raik; Moehrle, Martin G. (2021): Stimulating R&D by finding frugal patents: A process model and a comparison between different evaluation methods. Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage.