Sciences, technologies et visualisations

The Corporate Invention Board project, which aims at characterizing the nature and the extent of technological globalisation, gives the possibility to track and analyze the transformation of global patents portfolio of industrial groups overtime. It also identifies the geographic origin of patents’ protected inventions. The Corporate Invention Board complements the “Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard” produced by Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. The industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, an annual study of the European Commission, analyzes the performances of the 2000 industrial companies (1000 based within the European Union, 1000 outside) with the most important annual R&D investments. Through priority patents’ statistics, the Corporate Invention Board focuses on the outputs of these R&D investments. Thus, the Corporate Invention Board provides information on technologies and on localisation of these investments. The Corporate Invention Board project has developed an original database which combines information extracted from the “Patstat” patent database and from the “Orbis” financial database. The first data compilation performed within the Corporate Invention Board project has demonstrated the feasibility of combining financial and patent data at a largescale for characterising corporate technological strategies. Additionally, a userfriendly access to Corporate Invention Board data has been proposed through a website (www.CorporateInventionBoard.eu). Two methodological adjustments, which will be implemented before summer 2010, should fix the main shortcomings identified in the Corporate Invention Board beta version released in December 2009.