How to Find an Emerging Application Area Using Patent Data

From the lead in your pencils to batteries powering today’s electric vehicles, we use graphite in various forms every day. Historically, graphite—a form of carbon—has been mined, with 80% of the deposits found in Türkiye, China, Brazil, Madagascar and Mozambique.

But, synthetically produced or artificial graphite, is slowly gaining popularity because graphite is finding its way into more and more applications in industries ranging from aerospace, air purification, biomedical, ceramics, textiles, and wind power, and many more detailed in the patent landscape report on Graphite and its applications.

As the uses of graphite grow, and hence the number of inventions and patents filed also grow, if you are someone interested in using graphite for new applications, it is challenging to figure out where to start.

Enter the Innovation Maturity Matrix.

Counting the number of inventions in an application area, giving more weight to applications filed recently, and plotting the two, we came up with a four-quadrant matrix for different uses of graphite. The more recently the patent applications were filed and the fewer the number of patents, it is likely that is an emerging area, which could mean opportunity.

Follow along these charts that will tell you more about one emerging area for graphite applications: conductive inks.