Patent litigation not only covers legal and technical issues, it is also a key consideration for managers of high-technology (high-tech) companies when making strategic decisions. Patent litigation influences the market value of high-tech companies. However, this raises unique challenges. To this end, in this paper, we develop a novel recommendation framework to solve the problem of litigation risk prediction. We will introduce a specific type of patent-related litigation, that is, Section 337 investigations, which prohibit all acts of unfair competition, or any unfair trade practices, when exporting products to the United States. To build this recommendation framework, we collect and exploit a large amount of published information related to almost all Section 337 investigation cases. This study has two aims: (1) to predict the litigation risk in a specific industry category for high-tech companies and (2) to predict the litigation risk from competitors for high-tech companies. These aims can be achieved by mining historical investigation cases and related patents. Specifically, we propose two methods to meet the needs of both aims: a proximal slope one predictor and a time-aware predictor. Several factors are considered in the proposed methods, including the litigation risk if a company wants to enter a new market and the risk that a potential competitor would file a lawsuit against the new entrant. Comparative experiments using real-world data demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform several baselines with a significant margin.

Technology prospecting is a process to evaluate the potential business values of high tech companies from the technology perspective. In this paper, we provide a new view-angle to understand technology prospecting by studying the evolving distributions of technologies in the companies. Specifically, we first exploit topic models to learn technological context in the form of probabilistic distributions of assignees and locations from large-scale patent documents. Then, we develop a matching solution to measure the relationships between patent topics and the description documents of technology terms. In this way, we can obtain the distribution of technologies for each company. In addition, we are able to assess the technology prospecting of a company by a designed indicator, which allows to compare the levels of discrepancies between the emerging technology distributions available as Garner Hype Cycles and the distribution of technologies of the company. Finally, experimental results on real-world patent data show the effectiveness of our approach for technology prospecting.