Innovations and Emerging Technologies: A Study of the Italian Intellectual Property Knowledge Database

A great mine of innovation is represented by the excellence of the scientific know-how of the Italian universities and research centers. But very often university patents remain unvalued and unexploited, in the so-called “Valley of death”. In the framework of Intellectual Property Analytics and Patent Informatics, this paper analyses the Italian patent database “Knowledge Share” and its proposed classifications (10 technological areas). By means of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, we examined 1694 patents from 89 Italian Research Institutions and a cluster analysis revealed the existence of 8 homogeneous clusters instead of the 10 proposed by the platform. Thus, our findings suggest the presence of possible inhomogeneities within the traditional classifications, probably due to the emergence of novel technologies or cross-domain areas, e.g., Healthcare 4.0; moreover, these clusters could lead to better performance in terms of offer/demand matching for the platform users.