Forecasting dental implant technologies using patent analysis

Technology development extends the frontier of knowledge and offers new economic opportunities. Global populations are experiencing increased longevity which in turn increases the need for new medicines, devices, and medical services. For example, the percentage of people with missing teeth is almost 10% with the largest number (over 5.5 billion) in Asia and Africa (Tsai et al., 2010). There is a significant market for newer, less expensive, and easier to place dental implants. This research studies dental implants to document the development and trends using time series and cluster analysis of patent data. The methodology uses a three step search strategy to define the target patent groups. The database is built using the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) online files and search engine. The first step defines the target patent groups using related dental implant key phrases. The second step analyzes the main assignees and builds a patent map of the patent metadata. The patent map analysis includes the trends of applications over time, the analysis of assignee activities, the countries of assignees, the forward citations, the analysis of inventors, and the analysis of techniques. The final step determines the quality of the target patent groups. In order to understand the content of the patents, this research ranks the quality levels within a matrix of technology functions. The proposed methodology analyzes the distribution of dental implants and the patent strategy of main assignees. Extracting high quality patents and building clusters of emerging technologies provides an opportunity for companies to explore opportunities for designing next generation dental implant technologies.