• Where a company is investing its R&D dollars and the new products and services it may be bringing to the market.
• What companies are involved in a particular field of technology, or may be planning to enter – or abandon – a market.
• In which countries a company is likely to market a particular technology.

• Patent-issuing authorities, such as the United States Patent & Trademark Office and European Patent Organization. The websites of the patent-issuing authorities are usually free, but only provide access to the patents granted by that particular authority. They rarely offer robust patent analysis technologies and other advanced features.
• Commercial providers, which offer their services for a fee or by subscription, provide access to patent collections from throughout the world, as well as value-added patent information, analytical tools, and other technologies for leveraging patent data.

• Inventor and assignee – the persons and organizations to whom ownership of a patent is granted.
• Class – the group(s) of like-inventions to which a patent has been assigned by the patent-issuing organization.
• References – the other patents and prior art upon which a patent advances a technology.
• Claims/description – describes the scope of the invention and provides detailed specifications, including technical drawings.

When searching for patents with the Internet-based services, your CI team may be using the Inventor and Assignee search fields the most, as this is how you will be able to find those patents granted to or applied for by your competitors.

The Class and Reference sections enable you to find the patents similar to a specific patent. By examining the patents that appear in these sections, CI professionals can uncover in a particular field of technology individuals and companies they may not yet know about.

You can get additional key facts about patents – facts you won’t find in the patents themselves – from sources such as INPADOC, which provides global family and legal status information. The INPADOC information, which is available as part of some commercial patent research websites, allows you to identify all the countries in which a particular invention has been patented or applied for, known collectively as the patent family. You can then see where your competitor has sought to legally protect and presumably market their innovation. With INPADOC, you can also review a patent's legal status to determine its stage in the examination process.

An innovative way to accelerate patent research is to use alert technology, available with some commercial service providers. With alert technology, you can be automatically notified by email when new patents or patent applications that fit your search criteria are published. You could, for example, set up an alert so that you are notified at the time a key competitor’s patent application or patent is published.
 

Analysis
 
With a commercial patent-research service provider, your CI team will likely be able to take advantage of tools and technologies that help them analyze their patent search results. This is particularly important when trying to make sense of hundreds or thousands of patents comprising a set of search results. These are some of the types of analytical technologies available:

1. Linguistic analysis

Linguistic analysis enables you to transform obscure, textual information into more useful knowledge. This type of analysis shows clusters of similar patents based on common keywords shared by the documents. It can be used to explore relationships between patents, create a more targeted analysis of your patent data, and drill down to the types of patents in which you are most interested. For example, if you were to conduct a search with the word “bow,” linguistic analysis could divide your results into clusters of patents related to devices for playing a violin, shooting arrows, boating, tying ribbons and so forth.

Results can be visualized graphically with a map that provides an overview of the clusters and an indication of the relationship among them. For CI professionals, the value of this type of analysis is that it allows you to focus in on the group of patents that are most relevant to you. 

 

 
 
 
 
2. Reference / Citation mapping

Reference, or citation, mapping displays a patent’s references graphically, enabling you to see the relationships between patents. With this technology, you can quickly see if competitors are following your lead in a particular field of technology. You can discover this by seeing if they cite your patent in the reference sections of their own patents. You can also use citation mapping to get clues about the value of a particular innovation: the more times a patent is cited by other patents, the more valuable the technology is often considered to be.







3. Summarizations

Another way to analyze large amounts of patent data is with tools that summarize patent search results and present the information in bar charts. For example, you can use such a tool to sort through and summarize your search results according to the companies listed in the Assignee section of a patent. By doing this, you will quickly see a bar-chart graphic that shows the top patent-holders among your search results.

These types of tools are also helpful in identifying patenting trends. By summarizing the patents in your search results by Publication Year, you can quickly determine if patenting activity in a particular field is increasing or decreasing over time. These types of tools can help CI professionals analyze the data in nearly every part of a patent, including Inventor, Class, Attorney, Assignee City and State, and more.


 



Distribution

The third and last stage is distributing the competitive intelligence gained from patents to your colleagues. Again, you can streamline this process by taking advantage of technologies offered on the patent-research websites. You can, of course, simply download or print patents off the websites and forward them to your colleagues. You can also produce reports with the aforementioned analytical tools to provide a greater level of insight. Other technologies are also available to assist you in this process of distributing patent information:

1. Data exporting

This type of technology enables you to export data from the patent-research website directly into an application like Microsoft Excel, and save it on your computer. You could use this technology to quickly produce a list of relevant patents to include in a report. This type of tool can allow you to customize the data that’s extracted. For example, you may only want to transport data from the Assignee, Patent Title and Publication Date sections of patents into your Excel report.

2. Direct emailing

Another way you can more easily distribute patent information to your colleagues is by using tools that enable direct emailing. With this type of tool, you can email a colleague a link that goes directly to a page on a patent-research website that you want to draw attention to. So if you find a patent of interest, you can immediately send notification and have your email recipients review the patent themselves. With some services, you can also copy colleagues on your alert emails, so they receive updates at the same time you do.

Today, CI is just not complete without patent information. And while patent research may at first be intimidating, the new technologies presented in this article may make it easier, faster and more beneficial than ever for you and your CI team.


¹ Derwent Information

To view the HTML version of the entire issue: http://www.imakenews.com/scip2/index000019276.cfm


Background:

Cindy Poulos is a director of product management for Delphion Inc. (www.delphion.com), a provider of software and services for researching, managing and strategically using intellectual property. She is responsible for gathering customer requirements and directing new product enhancements for the company’s web-based patent research service, Delphion Research. Cindy has 15 years of marketing experience, including managing product marketing for a line of data warehousing and decision support tools as well as having responsibility for managing CI for a business unit in a large software firm.

Delphion Research is an Internet-based service for researching and analyzing patents and related intellectual property information on a worldwide basis. With Delphion Research, business professionals can search all the world's top patent collections, including those of the U.S., Europe, Japan, and World Intellectual Property Organization; leverage unique and exclusive productivity tools to analyze and track market developments and competitive activities; and view, download and print high-quality patent images.



Copyright 2002 Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals  www.scip.org

SCIP.online, volume 1 number 15, September 3, 2002.

There are no letters available.