Patent iNSIGHT Pro - Blog

An Insight Into WIPO 2009 International Patent Filings

Muthu Ramalingam — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:26:00 GMT

The WIPO Patent Filings Report was published last month and at first glance 2009 seems like a year when innovation was held back by the economic turmoil especially across developed countries. Overall the report shows a 4.5% decline in filings from the 2008 figures but despite the decline, it also reveals some interesting insights into the changing face of innovation globally. Here are just some of the insights the 2009 international patent filings reveal:

Industrialized Nations Vs Developing Nations

Are the innovation efforts of more industrialized nations more susceptible to significant declines as a result of the economic conditions as compared to the developing counties? The filings seem to suggest so. While USA, Germany, Sweden and Canada showed declines of 11.4%, 11.2%, 11.3% and 11.7% respectively, China had an increase of 29.7% in patent filings.

Top 5 Counties for Patent Filings & How They Fared In 2008 vs 2009

Electronics Dominate The Applications

The electronics industry dominated the patent filings charts with most of the top 10 and a significant portion of the top 100 featuring electronics manufacturers. Japans Panasonic Corp, China’s Huawei Technologies and Germany’s Robert Bosch GMBH taking the top three spots.

Developing Countries To Look Out For

Korea, China, India, Brazil and South Africa lead patent filings from developing countries with Turkey, Malaysia, Mexico and Barbados close behind. Korea and China which were earlier looked upon more as manufacturing centers of the world are rapidly evolving to becoming innovative economies as figures show.

In terms of share in filings amongst developing countries, Korea and China lead with a sizable lead over the rest and competitively gaining ground over several developed nations too.

While 2009 with it’s economic significance may not be indicative of the upcoming years, the WIPO patent filings show there are some significant global implications to how the world’s innovation centers are evolving.

Analyzing Increasingly Large Patent Sets To Fuel Innovation Of Tomorrow

Muthu Ramalingam — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 05:08:00 GMT

The backed up patent applications at most patent offices and long waits to process new applications may be annoying for most inventors and businesses alike but it amplifies just how fast innovation is happening today as compared to a decade or two ago.

Perhaps one of the most significant drivers for this pace is information technology and the instant availability of the vast existing knowledge base (patent and journal databases) for scientists and innovators to build on it. While researching and analyzing past technologies has always been a part of the process for those on a quest to discover something new, the process in the past relied on the ability to go through vast amounts of information manually, carry out analysis and then use that knowledge to take things to the next level. The same process applies today but the speed at which existing knowledge can be analyzed has been increasing tremendously.

For example, if one is looking for alternatives to fossil fuels and traditional energy sources the first phase would involve going through past efforts to understand what’s been done, then looking for patterns, gaps and opportunities within that data and finally being able to find a direction to focus your research or investigation on. Prior to advancements in text processing and software in general, this involved gathering and sifting through piles of existing patents and journal citations. However the sheer number of patents alone (> 5000) that exist in alternative energy technology as well as patents indirectly related to these, the older procedure can take weeks, months or longer

Organizing IP Research across different technology verticals of interest is a pressing need for corporate IP practitioners. A in-depth research and analysis effort which used to take a long time can now effectively done used advanced search and fast scanning tools present in patent analysis and research platforms. Being able to quickly report on different technologies, integrate feedback from sales and R&D into your IP research and present a unified output is now possible by the use of such solutions.

Knowledge management in the IP and innovation space is getting better and quicker everyday. With it, the kind of analyzed and precise information that research teams can have access to is revolutionizing the speed at which companies innovate and thereby giving them an edge over their competition. While this isn’t helping the situation at the patent offices with the back logs of applications there is still a brighter side to it for innovators: there are quick and efficient ways to get insights from large reference information sets and build a better tomorrow..

Interactive Intellectual Property Research Delivery – and Paperless too

Muthu Ramalingam — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:45:00 GMT

A very recently published article by David Flint and Valerie Surgenor titled “United Kingdom: Innovators Encouraged To Go Paperless” emphasizes the calls from various governments around the world in recent times to cut down on paper intensive work processes. This measure in the UK comes just as Gene Quinn’s IP Watchdog carried a post titled “President Obama Call USPTO Filling System Embarrassing” where Gene points out:

“Essentially, President Obama said that the way the Patent Office handles electronically filed patent applications is to print them and scan them. Sadly, that is not true, or is at least extremely misleading. It is certainly true that the Patent Office used to do things that way, but since the new EFS Web system was unveiled on March 16, 2006, electronically filed patent applications are not printed and then scanned.”

The Intellectual Property research process, albeit different from patent office work, is also a data intensive one and in recent times appears to be moving towards electronic and interactive outputs as opposed to paper based reports or static PDFs.

At Patent iNSIGHT Pro, we see a similar trends. Analysts who used the product two years back to prepare reports in Word/Excel/PDFs/PowerPoint are now asking for enterprise class implementations where they can set up online dashboard for the information consumers. This is as true for in-house counsels, as it is for service providers who want to give secure access to such interactive dashboards to their clients.

When it comes to IP research, speed is of the essence as is access to those within an organization who need it. Whether needed by management, product development teams, legal team or business development teams, the need to get the information required and a live dashboard with built in analytics features of drill-down and filtering goes well to serve the needs of multiple different people. While working with static reports this is severe road block. Usually when CxOs are presented with the research output they would have further questions and its very convenient and effective if they can quickly answer that right then from a real-time interactive dashboard.

All taken into consideration while reducing paper usage is a good enough reason to start shifting towards more automated means of managing all the research being done, it’s not the only reason to consider it. Automated delivery of research output and interactive analytics at the front end is clearly the way forward and cannot be achieved if the research is scattered across in physical documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other documents

Charge-Coupled Device - The Electronic Eye

Muthu Ramalingam — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:16:00 GMT

Willard Boyle and George Smith are two innovators who just last week got the recognition they long deserved for their contribution which quite literally changed the way we see the world. The two Nobel laureates who were presented their Nobels for Physics in Norway last week invented the charge-coupled device which most of us commonly know as the CCD which is the core technology used by digital cameras today. What is fascinating is Boyle and Smith had invented the CCD 40 years ago back in 1969 and though all these years later as they collect what is perceived to be the highest accolade in science, perhaps the bigger prize was seeing how the finger nail sized device they came up with touched the lives of so many.

One of the largest impact it’s had is in the development of the digital photo camera which almost each of us own whether in the form of an SLR camera, a point and shoot digital camera or even one that’s housed in our mobile phones. The core CCD technology is now being used in a variety of technologies and almost all electronic and appliances firms are involved in applications around it.

To see who is active and aggressive in CCD related research, we did a broad search on CCD technology and using Patent iNSIGHT Pro came up with a couple of quick stats. The first one is the overall trend across key Assignees that shows that while Samsung and Kodak have been periodically filing for patents in this space, recent research has subsided for other large companies such as Hyundai, Fuji and Sony. One can easily see the emergence of Hon Hai precision Co as a recent company in this space.

To confirm this further, we split the company portfolios across 5 year sets (2000-2004) and (2005-2010) to compare their trends:

The above chart shows that big companies that have renewed interest in CCD and related technologies are Siemens, Honeywell, General Electric, Philips and Xerox. The activity analysis further shows some firms building targeted portfolios such as Hong Fu Jin Precision Co, Chemimage, Avision and ASML Holdings NV.

The trends of General Electric and Hon Hai Precision clearly stand out since both do not have any filings that talk about CCDs in 2000-2004 and have 16 and 68 filings respective in the last 5 years. To find out the focus areas of these filings, we used text clustering on the individual portfolios of each company. The analysis showed that the GE filings focus on Radiation detection, Scintillators, Plasma spectroscopy and X-rays. Hon Hai Precision Co’s focus was more on camera lens for imaging, monitoring and measuring across a variety of areas right from vehicular systems to cameras.

Finally, to know the different research areas in which CCD technology has grown into and their trends we took the IPC distribution again across a 5 year period and compares the growth/decay from 2000-2004 period to 2005-2010 period. This is shown below:

To sum up, forty years into the technology life-cycle, CCD is still going strong with companies across the world still discovering new applications in various areas with the help of this device.

Flow of IP Knowledge & Patent Intelligence Through a Organization

Muthu Ramalingam — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:37:00 GMT

The European Patent Academy did an insightful presentation Patent & Innovation Management at Istanbul at the start of this month. While the presentation covers a wider topic, a single slide on the innovation process stands out to demonstrate the importance of having a robust IP knowledge management system in place to ensure the flow of information along side the process.

The innovation process involves:

Creation of Ideas >> Project Design >> Project Development >> Production >> Market Launch

In any innovation driven business each of these areas can be further broken down into multiple activities which revolve around the development and management of intellectual property including activities like filing for new patents, protecting IP assets, maneuvering through competitors patents, strategic product development and more. However the value of right information is critical throughout the cycle. IP knowledge and intelligence functions as a support pillar right from creation of ideas to marketing the product and right through the product life-cycle.

The entire innovation process is supported and seen through by multiple departments and functions within the company. Its a combined effort of research, thinkers, designers, developers, legal professionals, finance, marketing, strategy and others and each of them must rely on IP intelligence to guide them through their roles in the innovation process. Having an in-house IP Knowledge Management platform helps since IP knowledge, access to it and ability to use it well is a common requirement across each department who has a role in this process. With such systems a company can offer a common knowledge platform that can be leveraged across the board. Along with patents even scientific literature like journals and other publications can be processed to provide intelligence on markets, customers, technology, processes, business strategies, risks, opportunities and competitors which can aid everyone involved in the innovation process.

The efficient flow of IP data and intelligence within an organization can fuel better innovation and translate into more gains for businesses.

Incremental Innovation – Pushing The Boundaries Of Product Development

Muthu Ramalingam — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:36:00 GMT

Every one of us has the ability to innovate, be creative and develop something new. We do this by developing on something we already know and pushing it to the next level. That is how innovation happens even on the larger business levels if you take a big step back and look at it quite simply:

Existing Knowledge + Improving On It = Incremental Innovation

We often look at research and development as a function which relies on very extensive knowledge of what exists around us and then looking for ways to improve on it and take it up a notch. This is echoed in a brilliant post I recently read by Gord Hotchkiss titled “Predicting Innovation” where he says:

Great innovation builds on what comes before it. This lines up with something I have long believed – there is no such thing as revolutionary innovation, just a series of incremental evolutionary innovations that at some point reaches a tipping point and appears to be revolutionary. I've used the iPhone as an example before.

Great Innovation does not require people to make radical changes in beliefs or behavior - Again, with incremental innovation, the market must understand the innovation and relate it to something they're used to. The iPhone made smartphones smarter, more fun and more useful. It didn't require us to make a great leap of

The same applies to just about any industry whether pharmaceuticals, healthcare, automobiles or technology. Every breakthrough product has been a result of extensive research and understanding of what has already been developed by others in the field and making incremental improvements which can often translate into a considerable jump forward.

Acquiring and managing information and knowledge is a large part of the incremental innovation process and having the right systems in place can support this process to great degree. Access to the right technical papers, patent information and related data open up avenues to increase the knowledge base one has to work with. And that leads to a common problem today – Information overload. How you manage all the information, create data points from assimilation of the information then bring out insights is as important as having access to the information.

Therein comes the need for knowledge mining solutions that help you unlock insights from the masses of data with ease and efficiency and further also help in overall managing the information so that you can quickly refer back to it at a later period of time. We recently referred to such a solution as - intellectual property knowledge management solutions in our Enterprise Edition Solution Brief. The ‘flow of’ insights from IP data is critical to the R&D process is setting up the right processes with a robust system in place can help them focus more on the most important component of incremental innovation mentioned above- “Improving On It”. This is after all where abilities to make a difference come in and innovative skills are rewarded.

Improving on what is known is where the focus of product development should be instead of re-inventing what is already known. With the help of the right knowledge solutions which can accelerate the information management process, product development teams know where the boundaries are and can redirect their energies towards pushing these boundaries forward. Isn’t that the key to breakthrough developments?

Innovation and R&D Picks Up

Muthu Ramalingam — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:49:00 GMT

As companies leave the worst of the global recession behind them and economies with the help of stimulus packages from their respective governments are starting to pick up again there is acceleration in R&D and innovation as well. News and blog posts in the innovation realm look positive with more frequent stories of spending on R&D is gradually picking up. Reports suggested that investment on R&D during the recession did increase even during the recession although at a lower rate than previous years. This post by Mark J Perry titled Despite Recession, Innovation Is Alive and Well. In the post Mark reveals

“In the face of a severe global recession, the world’s 1,000 largest publicly traded corporate research and development spenders increased R&D budgets in 2008, affirming the critical importance of innovation to their corporate strategies, according to Booz & Company’s Global Innovation 1000, the global management consulting firm’s fifth annual analysis of global innovation spending. R&D spending at these firms rose 5.7% in 2008, a slower rate of growth than the prior year’s 10% increase, but in line with the group’s 6.5% increase in worldwide sales. More than two-thirds of the companies included in this year’s Global Innovation 1000 maintained or increased R&D spending in 2008, even though a third of the companies reported a financial loss for the year.

However during the downturn almost every business had to look into it’s processes and make changes that would help see them through this rough financial period and whatever those changes were, they are not likely to go away in the near future. Mergers and Acquisitions in IP pickedup as many smaller firms facing closure had their IP up for sale. While some large businesses were also looking at trimming their patent portfolios others with a larger cash reserves were busy aggregating portfolios that were valuable and available for pennies to the dollar. Many IP departments were forced to look at operational efficiencies and as to how they can save time and cost and achieve better output. Innovation and R&D are no exceptions to this. Although organizations know that innovation is key to secure future success and will continue to invest in R&D, they are also likely to continue to look for ways to improve their R&D processes and innovate smart rather than by pouring capital into it.

Smarter innovation practices can be through using online collaboration platforms and getting customers more involved in the process. It can be through seeking strategic partnerships with other organizations working towards similar technologies to share R&D costs and speed up efforts. It could be through improving patent information sharing systems and having access to better information, making smarter, better calculated decisions and avoiding mistakes that can cost time and money. The possibilities are plenty. What is left to do is find out how to innovate smarter and strengthen the process from the inside and make it more efficient. After all innovation needs to work towards creating revenue and advantages for the business and not be perceived as a cost center or financial black hole.

Perhaps the recession in many ways helped organizations pause and take a look at how they were functioning and pushed everyone to seek improved ways to go about it. Though the pressure has eased, hopefully, the will to keep improving and making R&D more efficient will not fade away too quickly.

Going Green Calls For Collaborative Innovation

Muthu Ramalingam — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:47:00 GMT

Every year a spike of innovation marked by an increase in patent filings happens in one or more of the several industry segments and creates a buzz grabbing everyone’s attention. This year one that comes to attention instantly is going green. The global initiative on battling climate change has gathered tremendous momentum this year as compared to the past and combines with several other environmental issues faced globally such as depleting mineral energy resources and waste the emphasis on innovation to work towards environmentally friendly technology and sustainable businesses has reached a new level.

A recent news article on Green Energy Reporter said:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted some 271 clean energy patents during the third quarter of 2009, which is the highest amount of approved patents in a single quarter, according to the latest Clean Energy Patent Growth Index (CEPGI) compiled by law firm Heslin Rothenberg Farley & Mesiti.

While companies across the globe are stepping up their research and development efforts to step up discoveries of greener energy sources, finding solutions to the issues we face is not just restricted to energy. CleanTechnica.com published a great article on how leading footwear manufacturer Nike has been using innovation and collaboration to develop footwear and apparels out of sustainable and recyclable material while making it financially viable for production as soon as possible. An extract quoted Nike in that article said:

From Nike: The long-term vision for Considered is to design products that are fully closed loop: produced using the fewest possible materials, designed for easy disassembly while allowing them to be recycled into new product or safely returned to nature at the end of their life. By 2011, 100 percent of footwear will meet baseline Considered standards, apparel by 2015 and equipment by 2020 – creating better performing products while minimizing environmental impact by reducing waste, using environmentally preferred materials and eliminate toxins.

Organizations have set themselves very tight deadlines and understand they are working against time when it comes to “going green”. That means the research and development organizations have to step up the innovation, look for ways to tap ideas from universities and external teams (Open Innovation) and move quicker. Researching internal generated IP and external IP is a key information driver for Open Innovation.

How you organize all the researched information is as important as conducting the research since you can quickly hit information overload. Having the right Intellectual Property Knowledge Management system is important for a better organized, more efficient process. Being better organized involves improving workflows and improving management and communication of analyzed information to the decision maker in minimum time. Well managed patent data can help tremendously in the research process, understanding what competitors are doing, finding collaborators working in a similar direction, acquiring technology needed to speed up the process and more. You can then make internal workflows quicker and efficient and easily share data involved in the innovation process both within departments across the organization and outside with partners or third parties involved.

The race against time to develop greener alternatives to the way we function today will require the best minds to come together in a quest for solutions and thereby compel companies to come together, work collaboratively, share information and innovate. That calls for organizations to be more open about IP research and have systems that can scale to support research happening locally and externally.

Nokia Vs Apple iPhone The Patent Battle Intensifies - Where Is The Reward For Innovation?

Muthu Ramalingam — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:25:00 GMT

In telecom circles everyone is following the patent infringement battle between Nokia and Apple with keen interest on how it pans out. Nokia claims Apple infringed on no less than 10 of it’s patents related to wireless standards with the launch of the iPhone and no royalties or licensing fees have been paid by Apple till date. What started out as a competitive strategy battle has made it’s way to federal court and the battle has intensified having the online users everywhere support their favorite cell phone manufacturers and having their own little war on blogs and web publications. The Silicon Valley Insider ‘s Business Insider published a post titled “Lame Nokia Sues Apple Over iPhone Patent Infringement “ making their view clear in support of their home team Apple but it questions whether their stand would be down played had the tables been turned and Nokia used Apple’s Multi-Touch technologies in their line smart phones clearly taking away Apple’s innovative advantage. Calling a company “lame” for protecting or enforcing its IP may be a little over the top. After all aren’t patents a strategic advantage rewarding innovation?

The cell phone manufacturing industry has always been one driven by innovation with the companies which have been able to think out of the box and innovate being rewarded with market share. There was a time not too long ago when Motorola was the force to reckon with. Although their market share gradually diminished and they lost out to other handset makers, their intellectual property rights portfolio has long out lived and out-performed their handset sales as companies today still license many core components which were invented and patented by Motorola. Virtually every handset manufacturer has had to build their new products by licensing some components or technologies from others patents. What is not very clear and yet to come out is whether Apple missed these patents while developing and launching the iPhone or if they were aware that they were open to patent infringement claims and decided to ignore it till something came up.

In any technology intensive industry it’s not impossible to miss patents which should have been brought to attention during the research and development process or during product development and marketing. Patent research and competitive monitoring data is often managed by multiple people across departments using a multitude of databases, systems, software and vendors. IP research and analysis for new product development can get quite unwieldy without a comprehensive patent system and process for managing workflows and tracking patent sets and it isn’t all that difficult to overlook technologies and their underlying patents that could be very important to have noted. Here is an extract from the post carried by the Business Insider which can put things into perspective:

During the last two decades, Nokia has invested approximately EUR 40 billion in research and development and built one of the wireless industry's strongest and broadest IPR portfolios, with over 10,000 patent families. Nokia is a world leader in the development of GSM technologies and its evolution to UMTS / 3G WCDMA as well as wireless LAN, which is also demonstrated by Nokia's strong patent position in these technologies.

With 10,000 patent families to track and keep an eye on from one manufacturer such as Nokia and likewise many patent portfolios held by other manufacturers in the same space the possibility of patent infringement liabilities is ever present as are the odds of overlooking important patents which could come back at a future date in the form of lawsuits or claims.

Apple in comparison is relatively new in handset market and has already broken ground with its superb UI innovation capabilities which is evident from their iPhone product. The Multi-touch technology which has been patented is just one of those innovations and as Apple’s portfolio grows over time other handset companies will have to keep tabs on Apple’s patents and may find themselves with horns locked in a similar situation some day. While many will base their opinions on whose phone they like better or who their favorite cell phone manufacturer is, the battle is about innovation and the ability to protect IP. In sum, businesses that innovate should be rewarded for their efforts.

Patent Analysis Tools For Intellectual Property Law Firms – The IP Intelligence Advantage

Muthu Ramalingam — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:43:00 GMT

Access to the best possible intelligence is the backbone of any practicing law firm and investments in research and information enhancement capabilities often translates directly into being able to build strong cases for clients. There is no exception to intellectual property law firms when it comes to building intelligence assets.

Most ongoing engagement with clients requires a law firm to have access to quick insights from the set of patents relevant to the case. Insights from having records in a research and analysis platform can immensely help the engagement at different stages.

Here is a quick summary of how patent analysis tools can assist external attorneys in their client engagements:

Firms can efficiently manage IP records that are being researched as part of different client engagements. Searches being done internally or being received from external service providers can be integrated into a common portfolio where the attorney can conduct finer review, refinement and analysis.

Attorneys can quickly open these portfolios in front of a client during a meeting to back up the advise or insight being given.

Patent analysis tools can help attorneys focus on the legal review aspect and spend less time in preparing data and results to to support ongoing litigations.

For most clients, patent text is often quite raw and technical in nature and perhaps not suitable when making a clear statement. Solutions with good analytics and reporting capabilities help present the data in a very clear graphical or tabular format which helps law firms bring out the facts plain and simple in a fashion that makes sense to end users.

Advanced Search Capabilities in tools like Patent iNSIGHT Pro, include features such as SLART (Simultaneous left and right truncation), Approximate searching, Quick similarity matching between Claims across full text of other records can be very useful when conducting infringement and patentability studies.

Tools such as keyword generation and clustering that summarize very specific words, sentences, phrases and even topics within patents could offer a huge advantage when drafting new product application in a congested technology space. ( Here is an earlier article that spoke about how keyword analysis can be done on claims.)

Ability to narrow down and efficiently analyze the right patent set can help conduct preliminary research before filing for new applications for clients. It allows law firms to know of any objections or obstacles patent officers might have even before starting the application process.

Many small and mid-sized technology firms that do not have internal IP research capabilities increasingly rely on external counsel for advice on overall IP strategy. Having the right tools to detect infringement, monitor competitor information, study trends, track recent activity and gather crucial facts is critical for such engagements.

Ongoing Litigation activity also requires data to be analyzed and presented suitably in the court as evidence to back a claim.

Access to intellectual property and patent information per se is not difficult. Being able to have quick access and answers to very specific questions and being able to retrieve facts with speed and ease is what can offer IP and patent law firms the upper hand in their daily practice and the right patent data analysis software can help unlock this advantage.

Key Features of Patent Analysis Tools

Muthu Ramalingam — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:34:00 GMT

Patent analysis tools though all geared to deliver information and intelligence around patents are often different in terms of their features and capabilities. How do you know what features to look for in a solution that would help your organization? Here is a brief overview of the various important features found in most comprehensive patent data analysis tools and what components to look out for during the evaluation process.

Search Capabilities

In most cases the search has already been done on a database, so why would you want search in an analysis solution? Searching is usually a requirement for custom portfolio categorization and further its critical when conducting deeper analysis such as infringement or FTO. Even when looking at a chart, its important to be able to immediately drill-down from the chart and search through the segmented portion to get to the answer or insight you seek. Finally, many a time you have your custom fields such as Docket Ids, tags, comments etc associated with each record and you would like to include these in your search.

Patent Text Mining functions

When working with sets of 10000 records or more if you want to quickly understand what locate topics of interest or sometimes even understand which topics are prominent across the set and what sub-topics they are associated with, a powerful tunable auto-categorization engine is a must.Solutions that are created specifically for mining and clustering patent text are better suited than more general text mining solutions. Generating keyword lists and using such list for statistical analysis is another popular method used to gain insights on trends across companies, inventors and their patents.

Analytics Capabilities

Some of the capabilities that should be covered are co-occurrence matrices, generating top 10/20/50 lists and citation analytics. Together they help analyze relationships and spot trends within a certain space and lifecycles of technologies and more. Drilling-down to the actual patents from any of the functions is key. It’s always good to get a few analytics questions that your organization has, tested and verified using the analytics capabilities so that you are sure if the solution is up to the task of handling your patent intelligence needs.

Charting and Visualization

Converting the results from patent analysis into a powerful visual or graphical representation with ease is a definite must. In many cases exporting visuals to image files is critical so that they can be reused in your reports or power-points. A good visualization and reporting component helps convey the insight easily without any need for explanation. Powerful visuals necessitate actions from the information consumers typically senior management and result in swift decision making.

Reporting

Generating different styles of reports to suit varying needs across an organization is perhaps the most common activity. Support for a wide range of flexible report types is useful with output format as word or excel so that the user can modify the report as per needs after it has been generated.

User Interface & Ease of Use

There is always a fine balance between having a feature loaded analytics software tools packed to the brim with options and one that is easy to use even for someone with relatively little experience of patent information. A good solution in this respect is one that has a relatively easy to use user interface which one can get familiar with in a short time and at the same time have the flexibility and options to allow the user to customize features, options and the environment that they will be working with regularly when any patent analysis has to be done. A very easy to use interface may not always give you that flexibility and range of customization while an extremely complex interface may defeat the purpose and make the process of analyzing data more tedious rather than easier. Look out for an interface which gives you both ease of use along with flexibility of options.

Apart from the above some of the other capabilities to look for are data export features, associating your own custom fields with patent data, rating or scoring system and performance at 10000+ record levels.

Is The Patent Research & Analysis Process Overwhelming Your Organization?

Muthu Ramalingam — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:54:00 GMT

A common challenge we have seen across organizations who have access to reliable IP information and intelligence from various patent databases but find it overwhelming to integrate, manage large volumes of patent data, organise various ongoing research and investigation projects and to quickly locate answers to their questions. The solution to this lies in having a comprehensive patent research and analysis platform which can make it most of your activities much simpler. Here is a 60 second Slideshare presentation which highlights this challenge. Be sure to catch the link to our 7 minute webcast video at the end of this presentation!

Is The Patent Research & Analysis Process Overwhelming Your Organization?

The Battle On Software Patents Continues - How Would You Resolve It?

Muthu Ramalingam — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:06:00 GMT

It’s everywhere! Blogs are buzzing with opinions and views on it, Twitter is flowing with tweets and references to it and IP professionals, innovators and the software industry are glued to In re Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw v. Kappos where the battle for patent rights for software and in particular business methods has turned into a war of sorts.

Some of the large stalwarts in software such as IBM, Yahoo, Accenture among many have shown strong support for extensive patent rights for software. Several other smaller software firms, developers and organizations like the Free Software Foundation see software patenting as detrimental to progress and future of the software technology industry. Gene Quinn of IPWatchDog.com in his post went a somewhat fresh route and not just backed the need for software patents but also insisted that star-ups and smaller companies have a lot to gain from filing patents for their software technology in his recent post “Why All Small Businesses Need Software Patents”. The battle on whether software patents should be allowed or not is a tough one with arguments both for and against this idea.

Those against it argue software code is logic and mathematical and the current patent system is just not equipped to handle such an issue. It’s almost like Twitter can make a claim they invented the “What are you doing now?” component of the application which allows people to update what they are doing through their software and claim “this is code” they used and it should be protected from others using their idea. Someone like Facebook however could claim that they already had this feature as part of their application where people could update what they were doing and share it with friends long before Twitter and their code though different was the original claim to this innovation. The arguments can go on endlessly and further innovation and development of software can be hampered if every single software component some developer programmed were to be patented and off-limits to other software not to mention how much more expensive software could become if every such component had to be licensed to create a working application.

On the other hand there is very little advantage for a true innovator or first mover in the software field and very little protection from the large players. For example if a smart developer invents an algorithm which can help identify and recognize objects and details in graphic images like photos and wants to monetize this through building a full application and creating a start-up, it could be just a matter of time before some large player like Flickr or Microsoft discover this and have their R&D departments replicate the technology perhaps with different code. In this system, those with the marketing might or large pockets to buy smaller players benefit without the real innovators being rewarded proportionately. That alone makes a fairly strong case for software patenting.

Whichever side you take, there are compelling arguments and there is no doubt that if a race for patenting software inventions starts, it will have a long term impact on the industry. It could change the way we develop software or at least the approach development. It would mean rather than simply checking for copyrights and licenses for certain applications or components, businesses will now have to study and analyze all patent sets around their project to look out for liabilities and possible infringement cases before getting behind the screen to start coding. It’s still important to consider the software industry can’t easily be compared to the pharmaceutical industry or the automobile industry where patenting and IP protection have been an inherent part of their world. Yet, this new industry has developed at lightning speed and the stakes are high for everyone involved. Though this battle is not over, the way it finally turns out will depend heavily on public view and everyone’s opinion.

So what is your take on it? Should extensive software patenting rights be granted? How would you see this battle resolved?

Delivering Key IP Asset Intelligence To Technology Management Decision Makers

Muthu Ramalingam — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:32:00 GMT

Management of technology and research relies on being able to make the right decisions at the right time which in turn depends on the quick availability of reliable information. Whether deciding on strategy like what direction the innovation and research arm of the business should take and which are the areas the competition has left room for improvement on to tackling issues like finding the right people to develop a certain technology or to license a component from, the management responsible for products, research, development and technology need a constant birds eye view of not just their own IP assets but also a clear perspective of the competition and the wider technology landscape to steer the business in the right direction. This landscape however is constantly evolving with others in the market also on a quest to innovate and develop and protect their intellectual property along the way creating the need to have access to fresh information promptly when needed.

From what we have observed, the common challenges that companies face with developing a robust process of IP information delivery to management for decision making are:

They have access to a large amount of patent data in the form of database subscriptions, downloaded documents and online sources but it's unorganized and every time they need to analyze the data for a new question or requirement management asks, they need to search through the data, gather the relevant documents and pages and then locate what they are looking for which is a long process that is often repeated.
They have a lot of patent data related to their technologies or domain but find it challenging consolidating all the right data so they can start analyzing it and present only what is relevant to the managements questions.
They find what they are looking for after analyzing the patent sets required to answer questions and they understand the answers but find it challenging to present it quickly and simply to management in a form that they can understand as clearly. They find communicating what they see within the patent sets to others difficult.
The time taken to process all the data and generate answers is often too long which is why they prefer going by existing reports or previous information which may be available online through searching websites rather than generating fresh reports from the latest databases on demand.

For example, let's assume a pharmaceutical company has had plans for quite some time to develop a certain drug for a specific heart disease made some breakthrough but came across delays in the process of testing and clinical trials. In the few years the drug was under testing and not ready to hit the market there is a possibility that others may have been pursuing a similar direction of research and new patents may have come into force since creating hurdles for the launch of the drug. The management can't rely solely on what they knew at the time they started the research. They need quick access to fresh information to see the road ahead at every stage of the technology management process and make decisions. That view of the technology landscape they need exists in patent databases but needs text mining and analytic support to bring out that clear perspective needed for them to make those decisions.

At any given time in the process, management may need some specific questions they need answers to quickly to make their call. What are the competing technologies in their domain? How many other businesses are interested in this technology? Which markets already have players for this technology and where are the gaps that can be filled? Where are the potential licensing opportunities for what we develop? Who are the researchers or innovators who can help us develop what we are looking to create? These are just some examples of questions management need answers for and turn to their patent information to have them answered. Through a clear cut process of:

Search & Retrieval > Clustering > Data Clean Up > Analysis > Report Generation

Vast amounts of patent data can be mined, queried and analyzed and converted into precise visual reports that are easy to comprehend in a matter of minutes. Patent analysis software which can process this allows for quick process of intelligence delivery to upper management whenever needed. As useful as the process is to management, it can prove just as valuable to scientists, innovators researchers and product development teams to present their suggestions and cases for certain decisions and being able to back it up with visual presentations and valuable insights gathered from the data.

Equipped with the right software, the challenges of being able to generate and deliver decision making intelligence to management as well as the technology and research teams can easily be overcome. We all tend to rely on what is easily available. Once the right information is made easy and available, relying on fresh reports and insights becomes a regular practice and the technology management function becomes that much more effective.

The WIPO 2009 Report – Interesting Patent Statistics & What Do They Imply To Your IP Intelligence Requirements

Muthu Ramalingam — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:50:00 GMT

September 18th 2009 marked the end of a two day international symposium for IP heads by WIPO. Based on the 2009 World Intellectual Property Indicators report by WIPO which was also recently released we can only guess there were a number of important issues to discuss including the impact of the global economic crisis and recession on the filing of new patents across patent offices around the world. Though the report doesn’t indicate exact figures, it does mention there was a decrease in the total number of patents filed for the year 2008 although over 760,000 patents were issued during the year and 1.85 million patents filed. Surprisingly, ASIA was more resilient and has been seeing steady growth in South Korea and China which grew 23.9%.

The patent statistics within the report create an insight into the global trends in terms of innovation and highlight several interesting facts around patent activity around the world. This information is particularly interesting for us at Patent iNSIGHT Pro since we work with patent data analysis, patent reports and statistics every day. These are the kind of findings which give businesses and innovators the insight needed to know what is going on around the world of intellectual property. It helps draw visible conclusions based on analyzing thousands and even millions of patents and present the findings in a simple easy to understand reports and graphs. Each finding implies something useful for some business or innovator around the world based on their field or business. On their own, there are plenty of interesting facts published in this year’s report which you can read here. As the name of the report suggests, the value lies in what the findings of the data analysis indicates and what it implies to your business. Some of the interesting statistics published in the 2009 WIPO report with regards to patents include:

"The five largest patent offices (China, European Patent Office, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America) accounted for 69% of total resident filings and 81.5% of non-resident filings in 2007. The high ratio of non-resident filings compared to resident filings is partly due to the fact that all patent filings at the EPO are considered as non-resident filings.

In 2007, the largest number of resident filings originated from Japan, the United States of America, China and the Republic of Korea. Between 2003 and 2007, resident filings of Japan declined by 1.8% per year. In contrast, resident filings of China and the Republic of Korea grew by 28.1% and 9.3% respectively.

There has been a steady increase in the total number of patent families during the past 15 years. The total number of patent families (based on first filing date) in 2006 amounted to 946,498, representing an 8% increase from the previous year.

During the period 2002-2005, patent applications in the fields of computer technology, telecommunications and audio-visual technology had strong growth, with the annualized growth rate surpassing 6%. In contrast, patent applications in the field of biotechnology have gradually decreased over the same period.

Medical technology accounted for the largest share of foreign-oriented patent families for Australia, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The largest number of foreign-oriented families originating from France and Germany were in the field of transport.

In the field of telecommunications, applicants from Finland, Sweden, Republic of Korea and China have an above average concentration of foreign-oriented patent families. Applicants from Singapore and the Republic of Korea have a high concentration of foreign-oriented patent families in semiconductors. Applicants from European countries have an above-average concentration in the transport and engines, pumps and turbines fields.

For the first time, a Chinese company (Huawei Technology) topped the list of applicants with the highest number of PCT filings. Panasonic Corporation (Japan) and Philips (Netherlands) were ranked second and third. US universities dominated the list of top PCT applicants for the university sector. The University of California filed 345 PCT applications. Tokyo, Seoul National, Imperial College and Osaka are the four non-US universities in the top 20 list."

All these findings may be viewed to imply something to various businesses and innovators. To a business located just about anywhere in the world which is looking to protect their IP interests in markets around the world the first finding on the offices with the most non-resident patent filings may imply that these five are top priorities for filing new patents going by the general trend of others. Based on this report they may want to initially file patent applications within these markets to start off with and then review the other countries which accept less than 20% of the total applications.

Similarly, a business or innovator working within the telecommunications technology space, may want to first protect their IP in countries like Finland, Sweden, Korea and China being above average concentration of foreign-oriented patent families. The same report also implies that there could be a much greater potential for licensing patents within these countries for anyone holding patents for telecommunications technology and displays revenue opportunities in these countries for their innovations.

The WIPO database holds a wealth of information which could be extremely valuable for smarter well informed decision making for businesses. This particular report shed some light on what is going in general with IP around the world. A macro view so to speak but there is so much more the data can tell with regards to highly specific areas of interest. With the right analysis software tools you can look into useful facts that pertain directly to your area of interest and gather intelligence that helps make better decisions. The database of over 63 million patents which are already in force around the world is your ocean of data to explore. It’s up to each one to discover what are the indicators they would like to track based on their IP intelligence needs

Patent Licensing in Universities - Extracting value from research investments

Muthu Ramalingam — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:38:00 GMT

Universities in the US encourage researchers with innovative minds to pursure their inventions and invest into patenting promising inventions expecting to generate profits by licensing the developed technology to interested companies. The technology transfer offices of the universities usually get many invention ideas from their researchers and have to decide which ones to invest further time and resources into. Many have already build valuable patent portfolios as a result of academic research and innovations which have become continuous sources of licensing revenue most of which is a lot more that research and legal investments made and so is used to further catalyze the innovation assessment and investment process. Here is an excerpt published by Forbes in a 2008 article on Stanford University:

Stanford University's fertile breeding ground for breakthrough technology may have spawned the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Google, but little Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., really knows how to get serious returns on its research and development.

To wit: In 2006, the school took in $4.5 million in research-related income (including licensing revenue and returns on equity stakes in start-ups) while shelling out $28 million on research--a 16% yield. That same year, Stanford pulled in $62 million against a $700 million investment; return on investment (ROI): 8.7%.

While perhaps thousands of universities globally develop valuable IP during the course of their academic research, very few file patents to protect it and fewer still are able to effectively capitalize by licensing their patents. Many US universities hold multiple patents that have failed to find licensees. Many of these are presently marketed by publishing invention details in journals, industry and trade newsletters, conference magazines (AUTM), using agents or brokers. While the culture of investing in research and filing patents has developed and matured in many US universities, being able to spot revenue opportunities within the patent portfolios already held by universities can be accelerated with strong patent analysis support. Much of similar kind of analysis is undertaken by Patent Licensing and Enforcement Agencies (See previous blog) and IP brokers.

Many universities expect not all their patents will be licensed. In fact most rely on a few blockbuster patents to bring home the revenue. Usually only 0.6% of licenses generate in excess of $1,000,000 in annual royalties.

Clearly there is need for universities to be more aggressive on the patent portfolios held by them. Assertive licensing and identification of infringers is important. However a change in research approach is required and universities need to analyze the technology areas their inventions lie in and gather data that can be used to back their assertive licensing strategies. By improving their internal patent analysis activities, universities can:

Understand the market place and discover licensing opportunities and spaces in the market for research and technology even before filing for patents
Discovering licensing revenue opportunities and spotting companies that are infringing their IP or those who would like to

In short, these universities can use IP intelligence to work smarter , make fewer more lucrative investments in research, targeting select research areas, knowing where the opportunities lie and filing for patents specifically for IP which they are more certain will yield revenues. Good analysis will effectively help achieve better ROI on their IP investments. Even if a small percentage of the Universities out there follow in the footsteps of the those with large patent licensing revenues, the impact will be big. Only time will tell if they do.

IP Intelligence for Patent Licensing & Enforcement Activity

Muthu Ramalingam — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 06:47:00 GMT

Most companies hold on to their patents as a defensive means to protect themselves from competition gaining an upper hand from their innovations and development efforts. Their ability to drive maximum revenues for the business comes from their ability to have exclusive access to their innovation and fend off the competition for a stipulated time giving them a clear head start. Then, we have the Patent Licensing & Enforcement Companies (PLECs) who either acquire patent portfolio or partner with the patents holders and then look to license their technology with a completely offensive strategy. They drive revenues from assertive licensing via legal notices or even going to the extents of filing law suits against those who infringe on the patents. Due to the nature and amount of damages being awarded by the courts it may appear that Patent infringement cases can be even more profitable and less cumbersome than manufacturing products and getting them out to market. So it’s little surprise that this is a growing business model. Intellectual Asset Management Magazine online stated in a 2008 article that the IP awards and settlements market in the US is $3.4 billion annually.

Small innovators can see PLECs as a necessity to help them license their patents and take on a large companies who may be potential infringers while traditional R&D houses see these as Non-practicing Entities (NPEs) or in some cases as Patent Trolls i.e., those that buy up patents only to benefit from suing companyies having established products in the market. While there are both arguments for and against these intermediaries, they are very much a part of the innovation industry as licensing as well as return on patent investments become a concern for many. As long as businesses and inventors will need help in these two areas, there will be a market for those who can help provide this support.

Whether you are on the side that is looking to license and protect your patents or the side that needs to steer clear of PLECs, patent trolls and other businesses who may have patent portfolios that overlap yours, your intelligence will primarily come from patent databases in addition to secondary online information such as company and products literature.

In a previous post titled Unlocking value from your IP using Patent Citation Intelligence we discussed at length ways to discovering licensing options to maximize revenue. Searching for infringing companies is not too different from searching for potential licensees. The process of assertive licensing usually involves demonstration of infringement and so technologies present in your patent sets need to be matched with either the claims of the other party or the infringement must be evident from the products functioning or product literature. Tools to fast search, lookup, rank claims help save a lot of time as part of this process.

Analyzing patents for infringement and being able to navigate around potential infringement suits are two sides of the same coin where information in patent data can come to the rescue. For both parties who need to enforce patents and those that need to safeguard their development activities against potential law suits, you should create a list of those working in the same domain who may have a need for the technology in question or those who may benefit from using the technology. The same set of companies form a watch list which PLECs analyze closely to look out for a infringement.

A 2006 EETimes article speaks about how a small company avoided going bust from patent enforcement:

Patriot Scientific Corp. had spent nearly a decade trying unsuccessfully to establish a new microprocessor architecture when it decided it needed to do some soul-searching. It hit paydirt when that process revealed its real products: patents.

The six-person company netted more than $24 million in 2005 from Advanced Micro Devices, Casio, Fujitsu, Intel and Hewlett-Packard by licensing seven U.S. patents it considers fundamental to CPUs. And it's just getting started.

"Hundreds of companies have been put on notice as potential infringers," said David Pohl, CEO of the Carlsbad, Calif., company, which hopes to collect royalties on sales of all microprocessor-based systems--sales that are estimated at $200 billion a year. "Virtually every electronic product that a consumer or business comes into contact with is touched by this portfolio."

The extract above demonstrates how important it is to be able to identify potential licensors for a patent as well as knowing who potential infringers are- an activity that has been mastered by PLECs. While identifying companies such as AMD, Casio, Fujitsu, Intel and HP may be more obvious, being able to identify and list the hundreds of smaller companies which in this case could benefit directly from the microprocessor architecture requires an even more efficient process. Whether relying on a third party company to which the task of enforcement is delegated or done in-house, the ability to create a solid watch list and keep a close eye on infringement activity relies heavily on having good intelligence at the push of a button. Being able to view graphical representations of relationships by citation data, being able to track the use of a certain technology within various industries and also to compare phrases within the patent text of a group of similar patents to detect similarities help facilitate the process.

As the ecosystem of patents filed grows and the list of competitors or possible infingement liabilities is on the rise , it can become increasing difficult to track all the developments and cover all bases without the support of good analysis tools. Luckily patent data analysis tools have advanced in leaps and bounds giving businesses the tools needed to protect their business interests through protecting their most valuable assets - their IP. Licensing and enforcement activity is todays vanguard for a IP portfolios held by businesses and we can expect to continue seeing developments in this space.

Unlocking value from your IP using Patent Citation Intelligence

Manish Sinha — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:30:00 GMT

Historically, the interest in unlocking patent value by licensing has picked up momentum when IBM declared more than 1 Billion USD revenues purely from patent licensing. This is why even after having successful products, companies with 50 or more active patents are looking at ways to unlock greater value from their IP portfolios. Nowadays, dedicated licensing teams are common across all technology driven mid to large sized organizations.

Seen in black and white from a business’s perspective, patents are filed to protect intellectual property and buy limited time to capitalize on the innovation. It offers some protection from competition and provides some space for the business to get it’s products out to market as soon as possible and make the most of what is developed. Within the stipulated time frame if a business isn’t able to capitalize on the patents, they could virtually lose out on their advantage which is why it makes sense to license the patents while they are active.

The raw material for effective licensing comes from patents itself. The balance information is mostly available on the internet. Patent Intelligence plays an important role when it comes to being able to quickly locate possible out-licensing opportunities.

So what are the different ways to go about gathering intelligence ?

The licensing-101 method is to look up the forward citations and then further analyze who owns those patents and then screen the patent claims to see if the innovations are incremental over your patents.

A more powerful and effective method is to look at more than just the forward citations and build a more comprehensive licensing set for analysis. This involves going multiple generations forward (atleast 2-3 generations) and going at least 1 or 2 generations backward and then going forward from them as well. Invention companies and universities, that invest in actively locating licensing candidates for technology IP held know the value of why it important to go back and then go forward. Usually when you do that you are in a better position to locate alternative areas of science where your technology may be applicable. This is also necessary if you have a technology in search for a problem.

So as part of this method, if you have a source portfolio say P and you want to undertake a more effective licensing analysis then you should build a portfolio that contains (g+1)((g-1)P, (g+1)((g+1)((g-1)((g-1)P)))) where (g-1)P is a set of all backward citations of P and (g+1)((g-1)P) is a set of all forward citations of that set. Add to this atleast 2 forward generations of P and atleast one generation back from the immediate forward generation i.e., (g-1)((g+1)P) and you now have a more effective set for analysis.

Typically it is not uncommon to run into a licensing set that has between 4000-10000 records. And once you have such a set, you can proceed with the next phase of analysis required to locate most relevant licensing candidates. This would include:

Advanced keyword searching though the licensing set with highlighting across full/text and claims
Similarity searching (quickly comparing overlaps in text portions between records)
Clustering is important since many a time you are not sure about all the technologies or keywords you want to search. Its better if important topics both big and small were directly located across the set and presented to you to review and relate. This is exactly what clustering does.
Co-citation based clustering (i.e., grouping together documents that’s share a high level of common forward and backward citations) of records to see which are the most technologically linked records with your portfolio
Ranking and marking patents as you proceed with identification (to avoid going through the same record twice)
Classifying the licensing set across various US/IPC and ECLA classifications and even your custom categories to see the spread of the records in different product or business lines
Finally you will also have to update the latest ownership information of the patent. US Assignments information can help to an extent, but in many cases companies try to hide the ownership by having obscure holding company names and private LLC’s that are setup as a vehicle to own and operate the patents. A fair guess would be that 30% of all patents fall in such type of ownership. Ironically these are usually the more relevant lot. So in such a situation, once you discover that they are good licensing potentials then further time needs to be invested in online research, inventor look-up, corporate tree and any other method to pinpoint the exact ownership.

As you can see that because of the sheer number of records its useful to have the licensing set in a medium that helps you search or slice-n-dice the information quickly. The time factor is always important and being able to get quick patent intelligence can play an important role in identifying opportunities before others, being more informed and thereby being able to negotiate better too. Patent data analysis software can help immensely in your ability to efficiently go through large volumes of patent data and quickly get to the answers you need. You can also go a step further by analyzing patent families across countries, to understand geographical spread and IP investments of potential licensees. This way you can rank potential partners based on the markets they have a strong presence in.

Software can help analyze complex citation relationships traversing a sequence of generations to help understand a company’s resources and value as a potential partner or licensor. The cost of filing and managing patent IP portfolios is a sizable one and ensuring maximum returns on this is the goal of every business. Investment into analysis tools like Patent iNSIGHT Pro can deliver to a business can help uncover hidden revenue opportunities and discover new revenue streams for underutilized IP portfolios and in the process pay for itself several times over. Good intelligence leads to better opportunities or at the very least, helps one see them.

Patent Analysis Software - Going from 3000 search results to the relevant 30

Muthu Ramalingam — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:35:00 GMT

Have you ever tried an internet search on Google or Yahoo hoping that there will be some results on what you were looking for only to find there were so many results that you found yourself overwhelmed? Overload of information is a common and consistent challenge. The same applies to innovators, researchers and those who work with patent databases and need to analyze information. On the plus side, there is virtually unlimited access to a vast amount of patent and IP data in the form of online databases and other technical publications. This abundance of data is also the downside for many as it can prove very challenging to find specific information across a very large group of patents.

Most sources of IP data and patent information provide search capabilities and while this is an important component of any database, it’s not necessarily the most efficient way of finding what you are looking for in patent data. It’s important to understand the difference and benefits of both “search” and “text clustering”. Searching is necessary, however since searches match keywords and identify results based on the hits they can end up returning too many records many of which may not fall in the context of what you’re looking for.

Text clustering technology however, identifies meaningful clusters of text or segments of information within the patent data which is more along the lines of how researchers would look through the data. It scans, identifies and then ranks relevant topics or concepts within the data which can help the researcher interpret the information better. By looking through a generated set of topics from the search results the user can quickly identify those he would like to set aside for deeper review and those he would like to ignore or mark irrelevant. That’s because clusters can represent both: topics you want and topics you don’t want. In either case you are rapidly narrowing down your search to the relevant few.

One must however set their expectations right since there isnt (and never can be) ‘the one set of right clusters’ for a set of patent records. Most solutions that provide clustering capabilities do not give any flexibility to the user to tune the way clustering is done thereby keeping the clustering process as black-box and not allowing any refinement in the generated set of clusters. That’s because it is assumed that the generated set of topics can only be used for trend analysis and not for exploring a.k.a “digging through” or narrowing down a large patent result set. However with the right set of tuning parameters a user can quickly instruct the clustering engine to focus on the “broader topics”, or just the “finer topics”, or to keep broader topics at first level and finer topics under them, or to give more weightage to topics or concepts containing a particular set of words. With such flexibility a user can now run the clustering engine more than once, each time with a different setting, to rapidly dissect a large patent set and comprehend its various facets. This flexibility has been the cornerstone of the text clustering capabilities provided in Patent iNSIGHT Pro and a wide range of parameters can be tuned to influence the clustering process at each step.

Below is an example of the use of this technology taken from our White Paper on Text Clustering

In this sample set, we did a simple search for the word “skateboard” in Title, Abstract and Claims of patents across key countries and then de‐duplicated the results to only unique families. This resulted in 552 unique inventions.

Text clustering was then performed using Patent iNSIGHT Pro* over the Title, Abstract and Claims sections of these patents and the results obtained are illustrated below. We have used the sub‐topics on Skateboards used in Wikipedia as a sample for cross‐reference.

For more download the white paper on Text Clustering HERE

The results are automatically categorized making it easier to narrow down on a category or set of patents and the data retrieved for analysis is far more refined. In effect, the way to better efficiency in managing larger amounts of patent data and being able to analyze the information quicker lies in the automation factor of text clustering technology.

Searching through an IP database, reading through the text of the hundreds of results and then analyzing the information manually would not only be slow but very tedious in most cases. While the benefits of smarter patent data analysis software go beyond this, for helping one find the information they need and presenting patent data in a clearer light, it’s an invaluable investment with visible returns. So while you build on the large sources of IP data you have access to and gather more data, also explore the right software tools that will help you quickly narrow down and get the most from your data. With the right patent data analysis software, even a 30,000 search result set can be managed efficiently without being overwhelmed by the volume of data.

Citations In Patent Data And Why They Need Your Attention

Manish Sinha — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:24:00 GMT

A friend of mine who is an avid blogger shared an interesting story of how he landed himself in a tight situation just last week. He received an email over the weekend from the owner of a copyrighted image he used on his blog without his permission and was now threatened with being sued and facing a fine for violating the copyright laws mentioned on the owners website. This came as a big surprise since he found the image on popular photo sharing platform Flickr, contacted the owner to seek permission, confirmed the photo was published under the “creative commons license” and made sure he complied with every requirement including giving credit to the owner with a link to the original photo and yet now he finds himself in a soup. It turns out, although he sourced it from Flickr respecting every rule and following the right process, the photo was originally copyrighted on another website and another photographer had claims on the image. Despite all precautions and doing nothing wrong, there was practically no way knowing how many people had claims on that image or coming across their websites and tracing the path of the ownership sources.

Luckily for him, it was a clear case of him being lead to believe the image was free to use just because someone else had published it under that license but our discussion on the fiasco brought about an interesting point. He said to me “I contacted the person I thought was the owner and did everything right, how was I supposed to know who had claims on the image before he published it and perhaps who owned it even before that guy?”

Now that’s where we can draw a parallel between his situation and the thousands of us who work with intellectual property and patents. Patents, unlike copyrighted images, have citations and there are several situations where innovators and researchers need to take the time to research patent citation history just to make sure they do not infringe on existing patents. Yet, many a time they find themselves in a sticky situation much like that friend of mine where a competitor or (worse) a Non-practicing entity (NPE) / troll sues them for infringement.

Today, having a strong portfolio of patents behind a successful product is good but not enough since there still lies the threat of NPE’s and trolls whom you cannot counter-sue. Companies with a portfolio of patents in a technology area must look at backward citation mining in addition to regular search when conducting infringement/FTO analysis for their own patents in order to identify risks to their portfolios. Going one generation back ‘(G-1)P’ from your portfolio ‘P’ is not enough and you must go at least 2-3 generations back or (G-1)(G-1)(G-1)P and then go forward from there. A comprehensive backward citation research would perhaps include {(G-1)P, (G-1)((G-1)P), (G-1)((G-1)((G-1)P)), (G+1)((G-1)P), (G+1)((G-1)((G-1)((G-1)P)))}. The same technique also applies to Invalidation Research and can help locate critical invalidating prior art for a blocking patent owned by a competitor or someone else.

In citation research, patent volumes tends to quickly become unmanageable if you are working with a larger group of patents and looking through all the data for specific relationships. Citation analysis is one such area where these relationships need to be seen clearly so that nothing is overlooked and the researcher has a very clear picture of everyone who has patents and claims on anything that they are working closely with. Patent data analysis software such as Patent iNSIGHT Pro comes with citation analysis components which can create citation trees and clearly display those links in a graphical format which is easy to interpret. Using both forward and reverse citation graphs one can see clear relationships across a group of patents and the chances of missing important citations is greatly reduced. Multi-generation citation sets can be created from a starting point which itself can be a single patent or a whole portfolio. These citation sets can be compared easily via intuitive tables and charts to help both quantitative analysis and a more minute claims analysis.

Apart from infringement or invalidation research, getting an overview of the history of and invention across a time line and following its evolution and usage can provide valuable R&D insights that can help make better product and research strategy decisions while also making clear the pattern of ownership and inventors associated with the work.

Despite the clear differences in copyrights and patents, citation analysis which provides insights that can help minimize unpleasant surprises like my friend had. With the right tools, it is possible to look deeper into the data and see the broader picture with a group of patents. It can help avoid any oversights and potentially expensive mistakes which were not intentional but just happened. While one perhaps can never to enough homework on IP data, it definitely pays to be as careful, calculated and informed as possible.