## 3 Results from Patent Data Mining across the Countries
### Patenting Activities in the Main 'Technological Power' Countries  
The trends in patenting throughout the technology industry worldwide is the first focus of analysis. A descriptive analysis accumulating the annual number of patent applications in the 9 countries during the 2007-2015 period is made. In terms of the total amount of patents applied for (in Sections G and H) year by year, Figure 5 shows the general trends in patenting in the technology industry in each country. According to the rule that \"the greater the number of applications received by a country's patent office is, the larger the size of the market in this country will be\", it is observed that the biggest markets worldwide during these years were the USA, JPN and CHN. Further scrutiny revealed that TWN, although far less important than the USA, JPN and CHN, was the 6 th ranked market in these years. This observation is interesting because TWN, while developed, is only an island country with a small territory and relatively small population (23 million), but in these years the patent office for TWN received more patent applications (i.e., the pink curve) than those in GER, GBR and CAN (i.e., the number of patents for which are indicated by the green, red and orange lines). One reasonable explanation for this is that, despite the domestic market in TWN being relatively small, because of the role it has played in the global high-tech supply chain [23], companies based in many other countries have applied for patents in Taiwan to apply for the patents. Rather than attempting to crowd out the market, it appears that these overseas companies have done so in strategic attempts to protect and claim their exclusive IP rights for their innovations and products in Taiwan. Another interesting observation is that although the last financial crisis seriously hurt the global economy from 2008 to 2010, the number of patenting activities in CHN continued to increase during that time. Meanwhile, as can also be observed, the pace of patenting activities decreased in JPN, although the pace in the USA was roughly maintained. These observations reflect the fact that the Asian market suffered from drastic fluctuations during the financial crisis, and these fluctuations had great impacts on the patenting activities of some companies in Asia. However, during the same period,  
Figure 5: Patenting activities carried out by the main technological powers: An analysis across the time span. companies in the other nations grew more aware of the importance of the IP market in CHN and shifted their focus from JPN to CHN. The subsequent economic progress of China confirmed this view, as China became the second largest economy in 2011. The situation in which the number of patenting activities in JPN is offset by CHN is discussed in Appendix D extensively. The last finding worthy of note from this analysis is that for each curve in Figure 5, a reduction was observed in 2015. This implies that in 2015, either the high-tech companies became more conservative with regard to patent investments, or they had already reached maturity in terms of their innovation efforts. In either case, this was a general phenomenon across the entire global technology industry, and the reason for it, which relates to the development of smartphone technologies, may have been identified by one global industrial analyst. He stated that, as of 2015, there was a technological bottleneck in the smartphone field that was hard for companies to break through [24]. In any case, such knowledge presented a warning sign for industrial DMs as well as 'investors' (as defined previously, e.g., venture capitalists). During that period, a lack of new innovations led to a failure to create new markets and vice versa: a lack of new markets led to a failure to achieve more innovations. In other words, in the high-tech industry, there could be no 'new profit' to be sought for. As a result, the DMs had to devote themselves to increasing their market shares of the 'old profit'.