Basic Steps For Doing Patent Landscape Analysis

Patent filings are enhancing at an unprecedented rate. Almost 3.1 million patent applications were filed in the year 2016 all across the globe. This figure is nearly 8% higher than that of the year 2015. More than 8000 patents are now filed every day, and the number is still increasing.

A patent is one type of pathway into the business for product and technical development activities of universities, organizations, and numerous research institutes across the globe. One of the most critical challenges that modern organizations are facing in the development of innovative products is finding relevant information in a specific technological area. The report found should also be analyzed in a way that will empower the management in making actionable decisions.

Definition Of Patent Landscape Analysis

Patent landscape analysis is defined as a patent mapping multiple-step process implementing human intelligence and computer software to organize, review, and extract valuable information from the search results in a particular technological area. An accomplished patent landscape analysis consists of references set, accompanied by the analytics set through which vital legal, business, and technical information can be known. The study offers a basic innovation understanding inclusive of:

● What industries and technologies are targeted?

● How long will it take innovations to reach the targeted market?

● Who are the primary inventors of the object?

● Which companies or organizations are operating in the working area?

● How are the problems resolved?

● What are the features of the product that are disclosed?

● Precisely in which area the patent is being filed?

Advantages Of Patent Landscape Analysis

The derived information from the patent landscape study is beneficial for any organization due to the below reasons.

● Monitoring the competitor’s activity

● Identification of the merger and acquisition targets and licensing

● Saving money and time on replica technologies

● Optimization of the internal research and development process

● Generation of novel technology

● Reduction of legal threats

● Establishment of the well informed and comprehensive IP strategies

● Enhancement of the revenue

The Process Of Patent Landscape Analysis

The necessary steps that are involved in carrying out a Patent Landscape Analysis are as follows.

1.    Review, Refine, And Search The Subject Matter Well

A successful strategy for the search process will explore the relevant result, terminate the inappropriate results, and do not miss the counter-intuitive output. Below is the refined outline on how to carry forward the review, search, and refinement process of the analysis.

●    Meeting with vital stakeholders like business development, marketing, and legal department

●    Search the non-patent literature for the patent class codes and academic articles that are directly relevant to the subject

●    Review the IPC and CPC Hierarchies (International Patent Class and Cooperative Patent Class)

●    Refine the product features’ list to the interest limitations

●    Decide about which International jurisdiction should be included

●    Choose a particular rage of the date to search

● Depending on the limitations of the product or technology, run a detail patent landscape search all across the world

2. Normalization And Data Clean Up

Normalization and data clean up are the vital tasks involved in the patent Landscape investigation. Normalization offers a means for a precise understanding of which companies are operating in a particular field, and which inventors are working for the organizations. It also shows how small and large companies’ portfolios are related to each other, and which enterprises are performing together.

During the normalization and data clean up phase of a project, the analysis with the help of other team members cleans up the data to make sure that the entire duplicate and non-essential are removed. It also ensures that the inventors’ names are codified. The process of normalization and data clean up is carried out as follows.

●    Removing the unwanted data like documents with copied codes, published applications of the patent that are already granted, and the corresponding foreign applications.

●    Normalization of the inventor data

● Normalization of the assigned data

3. Category Creation And Populating Them

In this step of patent landscape study, the experts create the category schema and populate the categories as well with the related patents. The patent categorization is iterative and results in the hierarchy that offers actionable insights to scrutinize the data from a different point of view. Below are the detailed processes that are included in the creation and populating the various categories.

●    Creation of category

●    Populating the different types with the help of a patent

● Criteria for categorization like market, technology, benefits of the end-users, inventors, rankings, and products

4. Creation Of Tables Or Charts And Visualizations

The next step in the study of the patent landscape is to produce tables, charts, graphs, and mapping visualizations. Based on the categorization of the documents, a large number of visualizations and charts are provided. These representations are valuable to outline the story of the patent landscape to the management. Some of the most important criteria that are carried out in this section are as below.

●    Creation of tables, graphs and charts based on the geography, inventors, citations, technologies, offline actions and many more

● Visualizations of those charts, tables or graphs through the citation trees, topographic maps, patent matrices, and heat maps

5. Ongoing Analysis And Monitoring

Completion of the ongoing patent landscape analysis is a time-consuming process. Once the analysis is completed, patent landscape reports are generated that require to be kept updated with limited maintenance. The studies can take from weeks to several months to complete. Some of them even take 5 to 10 years to complete. However, once the filtering criteria and the search strings are established to create the reports, the data needs a confined time commitment.

Wrapping It Up

Patent information offers goldmine data that is available on the internet, including your biggest rival. A patent landscape study provides a navigating map for investigating the competitor landscape. It is also vital in creating powerful innovation capture, identification, management, and capture of the programs in any organization. By implementing these 5 step processes for patent landscape investigation, you can get actionable results for the companies to make more strategic and well-informed business decisions.

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