The idea machine: CI practice and patents.

Lynn Tellefsen, Cypheron Systems LLC, ltellefsen@rapidpat.com

The information economy and its emphasis on innovation grows stronger as organizations increasingly look internally to generate new ideas and to fuel their innovation process. That the world needs pioneers among thinkers and inventors has been a much-reported topic on mainstream media lately—from “25 Ideas for a Changing World[i],” “A New Strategy for Igniting Inventiveness[ii],” to “The Invention Factory,[iii]” and “Creation Nation,”[iv] to cite a few.

Leading technology companies have introduced marketing strategies that clearly express today’s emphasis on innovation. Consider these trademarks and service marks of leading technology providers: Sharp®’-Be Sharp™, Hewlett-Packard®-“Invent™”, Canon-“Know How™,” NEC®-“Empowered by Innovation™,” “Philips®’--“It’s getting better all the time.”™

Making patent information more accessible

In 1997, IBM introduced its Patent Server, leveraging its enormous server and DB2 database technology and computing capacities to provide the public unlimited access to patent information. This technological milestone helped to educate organizations and the American public to the benefits of patent information from the United States patent collection.

Because being competitive depends upon the generation of new inventions and their applications, organizations are increasingly looking in-house to fuel their innovation practice.[v] The evolution of hard disk devices and improved networking technology, combined with an organization’s need for privacy, security, and better systems performance is the momentum behind a growing trend for companies to replace outsourced, browser-based internet information solutions with in-house systems of standard and proprietary content holdings.

Enterprise development presents a valuable investment for many companies, with exponential returns including more efficient information acquisition and management, faster knowledge transfer, the generation of more ideas, better human resources management, and increased end-user satisfaction. How can the CI practice benefit from an in-house system to leverage competitive stance and foster growth?

The CI practice and patent information: discovery and analysis

An organization’s CI practice examines patent information to identify and to understand competitive portfolios, to analyze trends like the breadth and depth of market penetration in selected industries and classes, to assess the speed to market of their inventions and representative products, to gauge the number of true novelty vs. “me too” products, and to identify areas where a competitor’s patent coverage overlaps and its relationship to the overall strength and make-up of its product mix.

The CI professional’s ongoing discovery and analysis with respect to patent information also includes analyzing patenting activity within classes or market segments, and understanding a competitor’s type of patent protection, its geographical coverage, their prominent inventors and teams, the strength of original patents, and other patent-specific considerations depending on the business needs. He or she may also use patent information to rate and report on his/her own company’s initiatives, particularly pre-launch product strategies in their own organizations.

An overabundance of patent information 

Patents can be one of the richest sources of technical information, offering “between 70 and 90 percent of invention disclosure not found elsewhere.”[vi] At the same time, at more than a terabyte and growing, the United States patent collection is one of the world’s largest information collections, posing a frustrating problem for patent-centric businesses and competitive intelligence professionals.  How does an organization identify, acquire, and integrate the patent information that it needs to fuel a successful competitive intelligence practice?

For an organization’s CI group, in-house access to patent information can provide end-users with unprecedented speed, convenience and security—while at the same time opening new possibilities for realizing insights into a company’s relative market strengths, weaknesses, and other analytics useful for determining or refining short and longer term strategies. Centralizing patents in a database/library and annotating, disseminating, and analyzing them provides value exponential to a company’s ability to be competitive. Indeed one annotated record morphs into a competitive item in and of itself.

For example, various analyses are used to illustrate in a meaningful representation how Company A’s patent portfolio compares to industry trend or to Company B’s portfolio, and where (if any) the delta lies. This type of intelligence requires that no data be lost, and assumes a regular, proactive approach to patent information acquisition and analysis, from a centralized, private, and secure data and software repository. The practice of “as-needed” patent downloading simply cannot achieve the longer-term needs for information access and analysis.

Strategic advantages to in-house patents

While some leading companies have secured centralized access to some or most of the patent data it needs, for most organizations, deploying an enterprise patent network remains a nebulous vision, despite the overwhelming strategic advantages. These include:

• privacy and security.
• data synchronization and validation.
• instantaneous access and interactivity.
• portability of data and intellectual analysis and findings.
• standardization of data elements and lexicons specific to a company’s area of practice automated/facilitated discovery.
• machine learning.
• natural language queries.
• any other proprietary applications or analysis tools that is specific to a company’s areas of business.

As companies reorganize and continue to invest in their IT infrastructure, this author anticipates growth of the trend to deploy enterprise systems that unite the data, software, and communications facilities integral to a company’s growth, and to make it available to all users, all the time—from an internal, private, secure network. For instance, the centralized patent network would logically serve a company’s CI, legal, R&D, administration and human resources activities from a single, centralized in-house data repository.

For the CI professional, in-house access provides a centralized, interactive, and ongoing system for identifying trends, analyzing patterns, gauging competitive strengths and weaknesses and the like. In short, such a system opens a new world of possibility for a CI professional to exponentially influence and contribute to its organization’s growth. What better job satisfaction than that?

Background:

Lynn Tellefsen is President for Cypheron Systems, LLC and oversees the Rapidpat Complete product line. She has been strategically involved with patent and trademark information technology and the IP community since 1991. Prior to co-founding Cypheron Systems, LLC in 2001, Lynn managed a line of trademark services for CCH®, and served as the Director of Marketing for MicroPatent®, where she helped grow usage and expand its patent and trademark services, as she articulated the value of patent and trademark information within organizations.

Cypheron System’s Rapidpat services help organizations to establish, maintain, and apply patent information strategically through the Rapidpat enterprise patent network systems. Rapidpat Complete™ makes every patent ever granted in the United States available in a compressed PDF format from an organization’s private network. It is the first product that offers the complete US patent collection from 1790 as an all-inclusive enterprise solution. A proprietary compression algorithm reduces the size of the digital patent from 1.5 Megabytes to just 100k. Rapidpat EPN renders it technologically and economically feasible for even small organizations to integrate sizeable digital patent libraries with their existing collections of technical journals and scientific databases, for faster, more powerful and reliable information gathering and analysis. Rapidpat also offers document downloads, full-text patent research, and custom patent libraries. More information is available at www.rapidpat.com.

Copyright Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals

scip.online, issue 23, January 23, 2003.

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