Compare methods

	Patent Analysis	Constructive Technology Assessment
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1995
Originator	Francis Narin (patent bibliometrics) and the patent-analytics community	Arie Rip & Johan Schot (Dutch CTA tradition)
Type	Document-based technological-intelligence process	Co-evolutionary technology-shaping process
Seminal source	Narin, F. (1994). Patent bibliometrics. Scientometrics, 30(1), 147-155.	Schot, J., & Rip, A. (1997). The past and future of constructive technology assessment. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 54(2-3), 251-268.
Aliases	Patent analytics, Patent bibliometrics, Patent landscaping	CTA, Constructive TA, Co-evolutionary technology assessment
Related	4	4
Summary	Patent analysis, or patanalytics, mines the documents and metadata in patent databases to generate technological intelligence. Because patents are structured, dated, classified, and citation-linked records of inventive activity, analysing patent counts, citations, classification codes, applicants, and text reveals who is innovating where, in which technologies, how fields connect, and how the technological landscape is shifting—evidence that feeds competitive intelligence, R&D strategy, and foresight.	Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA) is an approach to assessing technology that seeks to influence its design and development, not merely to forecast its impacts after the fact. By broadening the design process to feed societal aspects back to engineers and decision-makers early—while the technology is still malleable—CTA aims to manage the co-evolution of technology and society and to soften the Collingridge dilemma, the bind in which a technology's effects are easy to change before they are known and hard to change once they are.