White-spaces are gaps in a technology landscape that have potential for attaining exclusivity. Many Technology and IP managers today look at white-space analysis as one of the key methods for strategic product innovation. Using white-space analysis they:

• Refine research direction by finding new areas for innovation and exclusivity
• Enhance product-patent portfolio. Broaden scope of existing patents by locating spaces around your patent positions which should perhaps be included in your claim coverage

In Patent iNSIGHT Pro you can use a combination of user defined categories and co-ocurrency analysis to conduct detailed white space analysis.

To start with, you should be clear along which lines or dimensions you are looking for gaps. Such as - By Product, ByMarket, By Method of Use, by Capabilities or By Application or Business Area and define the exact categories within the dimension.

The white space analysis activity proceeds in five steps:

1. Conduct a broad search and create a set of patents

2. Generate keywords (terms/tokens) from the claims of patents. Use the stop-word customization and keyword generation feature to generate a comprehensive set of keywords from the claims of the patents.

3. Cleanup keywords and assignees using various tools in the software. The raw lists of keywords and Assignees can be cleaned using multiple tools such as Fuzzy matching or by applying a thesaurus.

4. Categorize (Bucket/Group) patents along the dimensions decided for the analysis. In Patent iNSIGHT Pro we call them user defined categories or UDC for short. Depending on the dimension the method of categorization will differ. For large sets of patents manual categorization will take a lot time and there are ways by which you can automate the process.

•  For instance if the dimension is more functional you can map the categories to the IPC/USPC classes and assign the patents in each class to the category. (Using Portfolio Cluster Engine in Patent iNSIGHT Pro)
•  As a second example, if categories can be distinguished by the use of a particular keyword in claims then you can use iterative Boolean searching to assign patents to their categories. (Using Advanced Boolean searching)

5. Look for gaps and patterns by generating the following analysis matrices:

• UDC vs IPC/USPC : Detect whether a particular classification which may represent a method of use or a class of compounds etc have not been applied to any of the categories you have defined.
  
• UDC vs Keywords : See what combinations of keywords have appeared in concordance with the categories. Keywords usually are a good choice since they comprehensively cover all terms, many of which you may not have thought of, and the absence of a relevant keyword in a related category is the early signs of a white-space. For instance if your dimension is by Method of Use, then such a matrix will highlight how different terms from the claims occur in various methods of Use.
   
• Keyword vs Keyword : For fine grained pattern and gap detection.

6. Finally, once a white-space is detected, you must conduct a targeted search across patent databases and undertake critical manual review of the patents around it to confirm the existence of a white-space.

        

I have been asked by many researchers on how an Excel pivot table is different from the co-occurrence matrix that we provide in Patent iNSIGHT Pro since both are primarily used to generate charts and trends between two or three analysis points.

While Efficiency, Ease-of-use, direct integration between unstructured and structures fields, are perhaps obvious reasons, I feel two key capabilities make Patent iNSIGHT Pro co-occurrence analyzer a lot more powerful for the end researcher:

1) Capability to Drill Down, quickly read-through and analyze patents behind the numbers in the matrix

Consider the sample matrix shown below:



When you are analyzing a matrix like the one above your first instinct is - What are the patents behind a particular cell? 

Researchers I speak to tell me that they would like to quickly jump to the Bibl. & abstract or Claims of patents behind a cell. This capability to quickly go through patents in context of an analyzed segment makes a big difference to the quality of interpretation made. In Patent iNSIGHT Pro all you need to do is right click and select “View records”.

2) Capability to create subsets from the matrix and slice the subset further by a different dimension

Lets say if your question was “In a particular space, which companies were most active at the peak of the technology lifecycle and at that time what countries did they focus on for protecting their inventions?”

For this, one would first look at the Assignee-Filing Year spread and see which year(s) saw the peak filing activity. Then only for those patents in the peak years, analyze the coverage (Assignee – Family Countries).

So what you intend to do is pick up a subset of patents from the results of one relationship and apply another relationship to the subset. In Patent iNSIGHT Pro you can select a couple of cells in the Assignee- Filing Year relationship, right-click to group the patents and then jump to the Assignee-Family Coverage relationship for the subgroup all within 4-5 clicks.  I will leave it to you on how one could achieve that in Excel.

In sum, if you think of it, both the capabilities appear as must-have if you think of a co-occurence matrix as a powerful analysis tool to manipulate, slice-dice and dig through the patent data and not just as a precursor to generating a chart.

        

For companies it is critical to detect white-spaces and patent minefields early in the R&D cycle each of which can perhaps generate or save millions of dollars at a later stage. Traditional graphs and charts are good for displaying the results of an analysis activity but not for quickening and improving the analysis process.

An increasingly used mechanism is visual analysis of patents that involves 2-Dimensional spatial patent visualization and leverages the capability of the human visual system to identify patterns and anomalies. The key advantages of visual patent analysis are that you can drastically reduce the time-to-insights and explore IP-congested technology spaces in a swift but efficient fashion.

The ease of use and intuitive nature of visual analysis tools makes it easy for even business and R&D teams to use for their analysis needs. (Usually in organizations, the R&D, the patent information team, the legal team, the marketing cum business strategy team and the licensing team are involved in various parts of the IP strategy driving a product.)

Other important benefits which visual patent analysis provides:

• Ease of navigation across relationships- Can be used for exploring through networks of relationship between companies, inventors and their research or you can also explore semantic relationships between patent content.
   
• Quick interpretation - 2-Dimensional spatial mapping of technology clusters remains as one of most comprehensible ways to represent a landscape and can be easily interpreted
   
• The Peripheral vision advantage – You can benefit from being cognizant of the clusters around your focus area. In some case these “peripheral clusters” may contain the golden nugget you seek.
   
• Powerful highlighting, search and dissection tools combined with a rich intuitive display makes is easy to detect patterns and irregularities within the patent landscape. Such capabilities make the visualization many times more powerful. For instance Google Maps would’t be as powerful without it’s built in geographical search, highlighting and other navigational options.
   
• Clusters that are co-located based on semantic similarity are very useful when conducting infringement analysis. (Ofcourse, visual analysis tools must allow for clusters to be generated specifically from the claims section for undertaking infringement analysis)

To sum up, visual analysis is a powerful method to address challenges posed by patent information overload.

        

As an Intellectual Property Professional, it is important that your strategy is clear before the patent drafter begins to write the claims. There are many claims construction approaches to attaining exclusivity for your innovation either by a broad claim, a series of narrow claims or a combination of both. While your exact strategy makes a lot of difference to the way claims are constructed, an important consideration is the choice of words.

The choice of words that you make will aid not only in patentability of the applications but also, at a later stage, in freedom-to-operate and infringement. Experienced drafters know that it is important to avoid commonly used words in the domain of the invention.

One way that you can prepare a claims wording strategy is to create a set of closest prior art and using a text mining software, segment (tokenize) the claims. In case of patent drafting, it is best that you do not apply any taxonomy or thesaurus to fuse generated segments (or keywords) since you would like to see all popular variations.
 

For organizations, its advantageous to view these statistics in context of other companies in the same domain (using a Assignee-Keyword matrix). Interpretation made from these matrixes can help not only in the choice of words but also in your overall patenting strategy for your product.

For instance I segmented the claims and created a similar matrix in a search set for a drug (citalopram) in Patent iNSIGHT Pro Co-occurance Analyzer and exported that into a Patent Assignee-Keyword Matrix in Excel. While many different interpretations can be made from such a matrix, if your interest is to work around key claims then the spread of assignees around the keywords can greatly help your choice of words for the claims.

The matrix also helps in competitive intelligence. For instance a look at all the claim segments containing the words "disorder", "phobia" or "syndrome" gives a clear indication of the applications areas that are being targeted by the companies.

So, while technology landscaping requires clustering the keyword segments into topics using various clustering algorithms, claims keyword analysis has many advantages for creating a patenting strategy.

        

As reported by Appleinsider, a recent filing with the USPTO describes a service that will allow iPhone customers to access their content OTA remotely. This means as a consumer, i have virtually unlimited storage on my iPhone.

Quite naturally this upsets many content distribution guys who aren't really happy to see such a disruptive nature of content distribution. Content is a highly collaborative business. What will be interesting to see is that if the filing get approved, how many lawyers Apple will need to hire to fight off the thousands of legal issues this model brings along with it.

However, there is an aspect of this equation that forms part of this 'lobby'. OTA relies on the carriers. They would want a share of this pie. Imagine if Apple charges $10 per user per month for this service. However, the same stem has another thorn - Carriers haven't really cared about content piracy or losses due to open content distribution. But now with heavy bandwidth requirement for this service - they would want to make sure content is protected and legit.

Apple has developed an excellent content delivery platform called iPhone. They have been insistent across all their marketing that its the best iPod yet and has crystal clear video. So now that they have the platform, the next stage is obviously driving the content. iPods did not have OTA. But iPhone does.

However, since Apple is not in the content business, iTunes' supremacy relies on third party content providers. The circle completes here. As a content provider to Apple, I would not want to rely only on Apple to sell my content. The lobby is a strong deterrent for me to agree to even distribute content through iTunes.

So if iTunes dies, where does apple get the content it wants to distribute through the newly filed technology?

        

Many experienced researchers I have met say that there is no substitute for technical analysis and the insights received from analysis of the patent data itself. Financial information such as profitability, revenues and market cap of assignees may be required for undertaking industry analysis, however do you really need such data for corporate licensing research? Lets understand this further in the context of in-licensing and out-licensing.

For in-licensing, in IP research, one of the biggest “cant help” limitations is that many patents are held by private firms globally and most online services fall short and do not provide accurate financial picture of privately held firms. In an in-licensing context, an “interesting patent” held by a Microsoft, IBM or Exxon may not excite you as much as one held by a startup or a small-to-medium sized private company. Further, as a corporate IP counsel, you are well aware who the big players are in your techno-commercial space and information of their market cap, profitability and annual revenues doesn’t really add any unique insight to patent data. Private companies in US are not required to provide their financial information to anyone other than the IRS, in most cases the data isn’t publicly available or only approximations are available. The same is true for most countries.

Financial parameters can perhaps help get an indication of where to focus your in-licensing efforts on, but caveats exist here too. Say if your patent portfolios extended across three technology segments A, B and C. Now out of the three B has maximum current market potential and licensing revenues are highest in B. However if you analyze the market and see that B belongs to a maturing market and the markets verticals in which C is operating is growing fast and in 5 years may overtake B then you would rather focus on acquiring patent in C instead of building an assertion portfolio for B. But it is to be noted that such decisions require market estimations based on industry growth trends and not on historical patent licensing information. In fact in the current example historical patent licensing information may even misguide you to focus on B. Now re-read this example with A as CD technology, B as DVD and C as Blue-Ray and you will realize why industry trends should dictate the focus and not past licensing revenues or assignee financial information.

For out-licensing, in today’s market, successful corporate out-licensing requires assertion licensing strategies that use technical data to demonstrate infringement and financial power (…. _your_ financial information) to backup your intention to enforce. So the bigger task (and the first step) here is clearly identifying the patents that are building up upon your invention. For this an in-depth technical analysis, especially claims and citation analysis is required. Once you have a strong technical case, then business, financial, legal (litigation) and overall environmental conditions about you and the companies behind those patents are to be considered.

So you need to ask yourself - Does the path to successful licensing research lie in financial data or does it lie in the technical analysis of patents? Our opinion here is that patent research for licensing must start with just patent analysis. How you build your search set makes a huge impact. Analysis of forward and backward citations can help identify related technologies around your inventions. Building the right citation sets and analyzing their claims is necessary. Combining classification codes with contextual clusters gives deep insights on how the sub-technologies are spread. Application filing trends can indicate which technologies are rapidly growing and which are maturing. Undertaking keyword analysis of claims can give many deep insights about companies active in the same research area.

Once you locate the patents, most of the “research” part is done!

        

Gaming is perhaps one of the fine examples of how boundaries blur between developing end customer value and protecting IP.

Let's say your software company developed a radical new rendering engine that can allow pixel perfect resolution and provide a gamer the ability to 'simulate' Hi Definition video. However, what you manged to do was that you did this without the need for specialized hardware. So what do you exactly patent and protect. The code, its functionality or its business value?

What you have done would not take any of the software giants much time to achieve. So forget the delicious incentive of your technology buyout. It's only a matter of time before they hit bullseye. Functionally speaking, your code will do wonders to game buyer. But how do you build a demand for this functionality when you are not interacting with the customer? Finally the business value will be perceived by the customer buying the engine - a gaming company. Will owing copyright to this engine enhance your technology's value?

What do you protect?

Perhaps you should consider protecting an aspect that you can control and that could fetch you better licensing returns. After all the idea behind patenting my technology is more to do with it's licensing than the fact that my name gets published somewhere! But how do you know today what you could license tomorrow?

A major challenge for your business is the evaluation of 'white spaces' in the patent landscape and ensuring that infringing has already not happened. You don't want to end up 3 years developing code along an algorithm and realize at the end of it that your patent has not been granted only because someone earlier had thought of something similar. More than that - you would want to make sure your investment remains strong through the gestation of your technology.

One of first steps to solving this is through efficient Patent Searching. By identifying key players and the technology spaces already occupied, you and your investors can get key insight into where exactly your code can make an impact. In fact intelligent analysis of this search can estimate what the Patent Landscape would look like in the future. You could also look at a potential buyout of a semi finished technology that would set the stage for your rendering engine.

        

Over the past few decades, the patent system has grown progressively. Today almost anything under the Sun that is made by man is considered patentable. Fuelling this is the increasing number of inventions made everyday. Organizations are seeking patents even for the minor modification they make in their original invention. Though this looks like a good trend, but like every coin has two sides, the patent system is also not untouched by the flip side.

It started with patent infringement law suits, wherein the defaulting party has to pay up huge amount of money as compensation. This created an opportunity for some. The opportunity of earning through the patent law suits. They are called the “Patent Trolls” who exist only to extort large payments out of cash rich companies. This trend is seen more in the technology space. The patent trolls seek to buy intellectual property to extract royalties from companies that rely on a particular technology.

Technology companies are known to pay up amounts to the tune of Millions of Dollars to settle the patent infringement law suits. This is becoming quite an annoying trend. Measures have been taken to curb this practice but haven’t seen satisfying results yet.

Technology heavy-weights like Google, Verizon Communications, Cisco Systems, Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, and Hewlett-Packard among other have formed a group to tackle this. They are called the Allied Security Trust. This group plans to buy up key intellectual property before it is obtained by parties who might use it against them. To join the group, each company will pay about $250,000 and about $5 million into an agreement for future patent purchases. Considering the heavy amounts these companies end up paying in settlements, the amount for joining the group looks very minimal.

The number of patent-related law suits has seen an alarming rise in the recent past - nearly 2500 through October’07 from 921 in 1990. With the Allied Security Trust, the technology companies are hoping to stay clear of such law suits which cost them heavily.

        

Texas instruments, one of the largest chip makers in the world has seen a dramatic shift in the patent filing from their Indian R&D Offices. Since 1985, the Bangalore office in India, has filed over 500 patents. Another chip maker - NXP Semiconductors, also seems to have a similar story.

Patent Application filed by Indian Firms has grown annually by about 20% to about 35,000 applications in 2007-2008. (Source)

Writing a patent application is not a day's work. In fact it's almost as detailed and as complex as a legal contract. While the country is filing patents by the dozen, this could be one of the biggest opportunities for IP and legal processing centers to look inwards and drive revenues from servicing US Based technology giants with Indian offshore R&D Centers like Texas Instruments.

As patent filing continues to soar, so will legal implications and infringements. Courts will begin to get burdened by open cases and hard ruling judgments. The next decade should see exponential growth in business opportunities for services in the legal and IP verticals.

        

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent over 90 % of enterprises in most countries, worldwide. They are the driving force behind a large number of innovations and contribute to the growth of the national economy through employment creation, investments and exports.

Among these SMEs, technology start-ups form a decent sized category. In recent years, success of technology and scientific start-ups has encouraged equity investment from institutional investors. Not only are funds cash rich, but opportunities are abundant. However, this abundance has a flip side – the fact that there are so many startups, some are bound to unwittingly infringe on existing patented technology. After all, a VC investment is always a risk and institutional investors would like to derisk the investment as much as possible.

Due Diligence on the startup’s claims is not just a pre-requisite. It’s in the best interests of the investor to know his investment is not infringing on proprietary patented technology. When a VC is betting on a start-up’s Intellectual Property, the last thing he would like to see is the startup caught in a legal tassel for its intellectual property rights. An expensive lawsuit is a threat big enough for VCs to back out from what seems like a lucrative investment.

Tools like Patent iNSIGHT Pro – a powerful patent mining and analytics engine can give the VC an immediate insight into the ‘patent mesh’. The application can provide an investor insight into the startup’s claim, it’s viability in the present and future markets and most importantly, he can identify the ‘landscape’. This means he can understand how technologies have been raising investment in the past and the trends of how many of these technologies have made it big. He can evaluate the ‘fit’ with reference to the existing and potential competitors as well as customers. The tool will generate detailed information that will form the basis of warranting the success of the business model based around that technology.

Institutional investors are the one of the biggest beneficiaries of such Patent mapping and analysis tools. A powerful Patent analysis tool can help investors identify new opportunities and isolate technology IPs that could make it big tomorrow, based on trends and the patent landscape.