Many firms are unaware of which patent is comparatively more important in their patent portfolio. A firm needs to prioritize patents in terms of effective management of its patent portfolio and efficient allocation of resources. The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the most impactful disasters affecting daily human life in the last century. It is critical to evaluate and prioritize technologies developed to reduce the impact of this pandemic. To this end, patents related to COVID-19 are prioritized with the CRITIC-based TOPSIS approach in this study. 935 patents-related data were obtained from the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) patent database. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no study in the literature that uses the CRITIC-based TOPSIS approach to prioritize patents for the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of this study showed decision-makers and investors can consider technologies related to anti-infectives, medicinal preparations containing organic active substances, and medicinal preparations with a special physical form as investment options.
Top1. Introduction
A country's technological competitive advantage has a great impact on its economic development. Competitive advantage will be achieved not only with material and monetary resources but also with the right management of intellectuality (Haykır, 2011). Patents are important indicators of technological development and are one of the most important intellectual capital information guiding technological development. They are used to following the industry or technology under concern. On the other hand, today’s knowledge economies are largely based on the production, effective use of resources, and dissemination of knowledge (Alper, 2011). Patents must be used to track value-creating activities. A similar situation exists in enterprises. The competition that exists among business institutions in the market place is heating up with the great harmony of the world economy (Yuan and Song, 2022). Some enterprises invest significantly in training human resources to properly manage their patent portfolios (Grimaldi et al., 2015). The position of countries in the macro area may develop depending on the setting of micro-enterprises. The reason for this is that when a business owns a patent, it first uses it to get ahead of the competition, but as time passes, it may provide financial benefits in practice due to methods such as licensing, technology transfer, and tax reductions (Yavuz and Baki, 2019).
Economic globalization highlights the need for science and technology businesses to improve their research, intellectual capability, and intellectual property strategies (Lei et al., 2021). Hence, the company-level patent portfolio provides useful information for evaluating overall R&D plans (Huang, 2016). It is emphasized that patent portfolio is very significant tool because this portfolio can be used to develop implications for R&D in companies (Ernst, 1998). Mouritsen and Koleva (2015) claim that the value of a company's stock on the capital market is strongly positively connected with information regarding patents. In determining the economic value of knowledge-intensive companies, the correct evaluation of patents depends on the right patent management system (Grimaldi et al., 2015). Barbazza et al. (2015) highlight that regarding intellectual property, ranking and selecting patents is crucial. Both the financial and non-financial criteria set can be considered in patent prioritization (Collan et al., 2013).
Businesses and nations need to examine the pandemic not only as a biological condition but also from a technological perspective. To overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, new technologies have been developed and demand for these technologies has arisen (WIPO, 2022).
Patent documents are good indicators for evaluating related technologies. In this study, the prioritization of the patents related to the COVID-19 pandemic is conducted using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. Among the methods, the CRITIC (The CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation)-based TOPSIS (The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method is applied to the patent selection process. The CRITIC method is used to find out the criteria’s weight, which refers to the importance of the criteria. The TOPSIS method is extensively performed for the solution of selection and prioritization problems in real life.
The research question (RQ) of this study is stated as follows:
RQ: How should the patent selection be for an investor who wants to invest in developing technologies related to the COVID-19 pandemic?
The contribution of this study to literature is presented as follows.