ABSTRACT
Several researchers link patent analysis with entrepreneurship, particularly in new technologies (Darby, Zucker, and Wang 2004; Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2006; Bonaccorsi and Grid 2005; Lemley 2005). According to Hullmann and European Commission (2006), patents reflect the ability of transferring scientific results into technological applications. Patents are also a prerequisite for the economic exploitation of research results (Chen and Roco 2008). In the following section, I analyze patent activities in the field of nanotechnologies, starting with a general outline, and then scrutinizing data coming from several patenting offices more finely. For this research I have worked mainly with the Nanobank and the Delphion databases. Delphion is part of the Thomson Corporation and provides access to intellectual property networks for the searching and analysis of patent data collections worldwide (see https://www.delphion.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.delphion.com). The lack of uniform definitions for nanotechnology means that it is difficult to identify the number of nanotech-related patents. In 2004, the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) created a new classification for nanotechnology patents—Class 977—precisely to address this problem. Class 977 defined nanotechnology patents narrowly by including only patents
whose subject matter is on the scale of approximately 1–100 nanometers in at least one dimension; and
that involve materials, structures, devices, or systems that have novel properties and functions because of their nanometric size.
