Innovation is today one of the best ways to improve competitiveness and to create jobs. In this context, the knowledge and competencies developed in academic laboratories and research centers must be transformed into products and services. To achieve this goal, the use of patent information is one of the best ways to understand the areas concerned with the research, to find partners, and often to shift academic subjects to more relevant domains. This chapter concerns patent information retrieval and automatic patent analysis (APA). It shows how the results are useful for the research valorization and transfer, especially to SMEs.
Part of the book: Research and Development Evolving Trends and Practices