I have been asked by many researchers on how an Excel pivot table is different from the co-occurrence matrix that we provide in Patent iNSIGHT Pro since both are primarily used to generate charts and trends between two or three analysis points.

While Efficiency, Ease-of-use, direct integration between unstructured and structures fields, are perhaps obvious reasons, I feel two key capabilities make Patent iNSIGHT Pro co-occurrence analyzer a lot more powerful for the end researcher:

1) Capability to Drill Down, quickly read-through and analyze patents behind the numbers in the matrix

Consider the sample matrix shown below:

When you are analyzing a matrix like the one above your first instinct is – What are the patents behind a particular cell?

Researchers I speak to tell me that they would like to quickly jump to the Bibl. & abstract or Claims of patents behind a cell. This capability to quickly go through patents in context of an analyzed segment makes a big difference to the quality of interpretation made. In Patent iNSIGHT Pro all you need to do is right click and select “View records”.

2) Capability to create subsets from the matrix and slice the subset further by a different dimension

Lets say if your question was “In a particular space, which companies were most active at the peak of the technology lifecycle and at that time what countries did they focus on for protecting their inventions?”

For this, one would first look at the Assignee-Filing Year spread and see which year(s) saw the peak filing activity. Then only for those patents in the peak years, analyze the coverage (Assignee – Family Countries).

So what you intend to do is pick up a subset of patents from the results of one relationship and apply another relationship to the subset. In Patent iNSIGHT Pro you can select a couple of cells in the Assignee- Filing Year relationship, right-click to group the patents and then jump to the Assignee-Family Coverage relationship for the subgroup all within 4-5 clicks.  I will leave it to you on how one could achieve that in Excel.

In sum, if you think of it, both the capabilities appear as must-have if you think of a co-occurence matrix as a powerful analysis tool to manipulate, slice-dice and dig through the patent data and not just as a precursor to generating a chart.