Prior art references help a patent applicant to determine if the subject matter in the patent application is novel and/or non-obvious. Prior art search allows them to assess the invention?s novelty, technical features, and legal aspects of its patentability. Prior art searches can take four forms: novelty, validity, clearance, and landscape searches. Patent landscape search report paints a clear picture of the patent situation of an invention within a given jurisdiction, or globally. A patent landscape search reveals relevant patent data that enables the applicant to learn about the various business, scientific and technological trends that encircles the concerned product.
The patent landscape reports are generally focused on a single industry, technology, or geolocation. These reports provide the applicant with valuable information for actionable decision-making. It helps in informing policy discussions, strategic research planning, or technology transfer. The search results help patent applicants and their attorneys to better understand the concerning technology and use the data findings in the product marketing strategy for reducing costs and increasing revenue. Patent landscape analysis enables them to generate ideas that will make the technology more novel and valuable than that of the competitors. It allows them to appropriately grasp the novelty and value of their ideas.
Patent landscape analysis, also known as ?patent mapping? uses machine and human intelligence, for identifying, organizing, and extracting value from existing patent databases. The analysis reports help the stakeholders to properly analyze the technology situation before investing time and money into it. It can serve different purposes, from generating novel technology, to identifying various technologies for licensing, designing around existing technology to avoid litigation, or avoiding the expenditure of both time and money on duplicating technology that will not bring much value down the line.
Patent landscape analysis helps to derive insights on the filing/publication trends of patents, identify the top assignees or key players within the technology, and top inventors working in the concerned technical area. It also helps to uncover the white spaces or technical gaps within a technical area. By using landscape search reports, you can source ideas outside of your core technology areas to learn from other companies and competitors. The gathered insights will enable you to accelerate your innovations. This article will elaborate on various fundamental aspects of performing patent landscape analysis.
How To Perform Patent Landscape Analysis?
Patent landscape analysis consists of various key steps, and the result of each step in the procedure will enable the stakeholder to make actionable decisions.
- Primarily, you need to establish the purpose of the search process. It will give you an entry point and further streamline the process. Identify the objectives of indulging in the patent mapping process.
- Once you agree on the purpose of the analysis project, determine the aspects of your landscape search process. How do you want to conduct it? Are you doing it yourself via analytic software and/or third-party services to search through patents, technical literature, and other market-related information.?
- You need to appropriately limit your area of focus for obtaining relevant results. It requires continuous effort for searching, reviewing, and refining until you arrive at the target landscape that contains the relevant subject matter. You must search exemplary patents and non-patent literature that includes academic content and patent class codes. Review the IPC and CPC code hierarchies, and refine the product features list to your interest area for eliminating redundant results. You can also specify countries to include in the search and a particular date range for searching to make it more focused. You can start with conducting preliminary searches, and employ technical and market experts that have valuable knowledge about your technology for identifying relevant keyword strings, patent class codes, and more to streamline your search process.?
- It is likely that during your search process you will stumble upon heaps of potentially relevant patents. Hence, data clean-up and normalization are crucial to your search process. Normalization will enable you to quickly learn about the organizations relevant to your field. For cleaning up and normalizing data, reduce irrelevant results, remove duplicate documents, and fix data errors.?
- After data cleanup, you must organize the gathered data. You need to indulge in the classification of results into manageable and useful categories and populate each category with relevant patents. It will enable you to effectively track and monitor key criteria that are relevant to your patent landscaping project.?
- Once you thoughtfully categorize it, you can use charts, graphs, tables, or other visualization techniques to capture the important information and visually explore, annotate, and interrogate the data. It will help to create a more robust and valuable output.
To Conclude:
Patent landscape analysis is a time-consuming process. But the search results of a well-mapped search process will help you answer queries related to your invention, or patents of similar inventions, and identify the patent activities that surround the invention. It will help to proactively determine the key actors and new opportunities for empowering actionable decision-making and facilitating innovation of the concerned invention.
