Samsung in 1995 and in 2010.

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In Part 1 we saw that in the period from 2003 to 2016, the South Korean electronics company Samsung Electronics topped the list of Non-US assignees each year, with an unprecedented rise in number of patent applications during this period.

In this part, we look at two specific patents of theirs, related to battery charging technologies. Specifically, we look at one Samsung patent from 1995 (patent US5744937) and compare it to a patent from 2010 (patent US9059598). The patent from 1995 has the title “Dual Battery Charging Device for Charging Nickel Metal-Hydride and Lithium-ION Batteries” and the one from 2010, “Wireless Charging Method and Apparatus”.

When comparing the number of inventors behind to the two patents, we observe that the patent from 1995 only has one while the patent from 2010 has six. While this is only a single data point, this is line with our suspicion coming into the project that innovation most often today happens with the help of a group of people.

If we inspect the innovation layers, it is interesting to note that at layer 3 and layer 4, the 2010 patent has a significantly more diverse set of cited patents, notably with a stronger presence in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Finally, we note that while these two technologies are in the same area of research and from the same company, their networks show relatively little overlap (20% at the third layer), as can be seen from the similarities table at the bottom of the page. This may be maily due to the fact that they are 15 years a part, and that battery power is a very important current research area, which means that there have probably been so many advances between the two dates that we would need to get back many more layers in the case of the 2010 patent before we start seeing a significant overlap with the patent from 1995.