Patent documents in STEM and PhD education: Open-source tools and some examples to open discussion

Patents are an unused informational source in research and education. We state that patent documents are an information source opening a wide variety of usage (monitoring, strategic positioning, technical document for innovation and state of the art) for a wide variety of users (researchers, Small and medium Enterprises (SME) and start-ups). Hence, patents are a key resource in education but difficult to read. The European Patent Database (EspaceNet) offers 100 million of demands in free access mode, we consider it as a technological encyclopedia: most of its content is free of rights. As-it, Patent2Net, a free open-source patent analysis tool offers the potential to extract patents from the worldwide database and to explore huge sets of patents documents using several data mining tools and visualization techniques (dynamic networks, textometry application, classification). Scenarios of analysis are provided here to explore patent resources. We show some instances for using these to several key informational objectives for technical education: to provide cartographies of a technology using mind maps, to decompose an invention, to map the network of actors, and many other features directly in concern with innovation, knowledge, and education.