Corporate Decision Making with Self-Organizing Patent Maps Labeled by Technical Terms and AHP

In this paper, we propose an approach for corporate decision making with self-organizing patent maps labeled by technical terms and AHP. First, we select the patent area of interest and collect pertinent patent documents in text format. Second, we extract keywords by text mining to transform patent documents into feature vectors of the companies. Third, we input the feature matrix of technical terms and company names into self-organizing maps to create patent maps labeled by the technical terms. Then, we consider several corporate strategies utilizing the patent maps and make a decision with AHP. We apply our approach to two patent areas (information home appliance and 3D image) to show examples of corporate decision making.