Patentometric: monitoring the scientific and technological trends of Additive Manufacturing in Medical Applications

Patents are a means of protecting inventions developed by firms, institutions or individuals, and they may be interpreted as indicators of invention. Patents indicators convey information on the processes of inventive activities. Therefore, patent statistics will assess science and technology (S&T) activities. Besides, additive manufacturing (AM) has become a revolutionary technology that is changing medical science. For this reason, the patent statistics will allow us to monitor what is the state of the inventive activity of AM in medical applications. The database used in order to retrieve patent information is Patseer and the data have been analyzed through the analytics package called Quick Stats. From the data obtained, it can be concluded that, additive manufacturing in medical applications is an emerging technology with huge market potential. Undoubtedly, the core of invention is located in United States, followed by Germany, United Kingdom and China somewhat behind. Firms are the main holders of legal rights, and the firm’s market value and the knowledge diffusion of technology are ensured by the technological diversity and the number of forward citations presented by patents.