Technological Monitoring Applied to Survey-Based on Brazilian Patent Applications about PEMFC

The present study aims to show the importance of patents as an instrument of technological innovation and to assess the relevance of technology of PEMFC in Brazil by means of the technological monitoring methodology from 1996 to 2005. This study used different Industrial Property Databases (INPI-BR, ESPACENET and DWPI), in order to retrieve the BR applications in each database. Relevant keywords as “fuel cell” were used in combination with specific IPC (H01M8) in order to assess the main applicants, countries, IPCs and technological innovation over time. In Brazil, the country holding more requests in this area is the United States (US) with 53,7% of the patent applications, while Brazil (BR) accounts for 4,4% of the total requests. It was also observed that the North-American company, UTC Fuel Cells comes on top of the list and that there were no patent applications of Brazilian origin (BR) in other countries

Technological Foresight Based on Citing and Cited Patents of Cellulose with Pharmaceutical Aplications.

The present study intends to present the relevance of cellulose by means of the technological foresight study through citing and cited documents from a patent application (WO 9745131 A1) as indicators of innovation. The European database of patents (espacenet) was used, combining keywords and IPC. The major applicants, countries of publication and uses were mapped. The patent requests collected are mainly distributed in the area of polymers to medical devices and therapeutic methods that utilize cellulose. The results obtained revealed that the US were the main country with studies directed to this technological area (18 patent applications) and the major applicant was the company Micro Therapeutics Inc. Therefore, we can understand that this is a promising technology that may reflect in an increase of R&D activities and in the patent deposits in this area