Chemical patent footballs

As part of a presentation on ‘Locating new ideas in the technology marketplace using patent information’, an example was provided which linked in with the theme of the conference. It relates to the exciting new field of chemistry opened up by the discovery of a further form of carbon, the football-like fullerenes, consisting of many linked carbon atoms, typically 60 or 70. Some statistical information is followed by examples of the patent holdings of the inventors Fuller and Edison.