EPO President, Benoît Battistelli, at the 2013 EPO Patent Information Conference said, "Patent information is a top priority for the EPO”. This was a significant endorsement of the importance of patent information by the highest official of one of the world’s most influential patent offices. Looking at our own organizations, can patent information professionals say that their own senior management shares a similar view of the importance of patent information, and its practitioners? The key to increasing the value of patent information within an organization is to apply it to critical business decisions, and to put it in terms that are understood by senior officials. Examples of how to accomplish this goal will be provided.
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Data Driven DecisionsPatent Strategy and Analytics Services
Why is patent analytics important from an R&D perspective?
• It’s a tool to assist with long term strategic technical planning
• It involves work processes for helping technical decision makers make smarter decisions faster
• It’s an analytical process that transforms disaggregated technological information into relevant strategic knowledge about your competitor’s, or a subject’s technical position, size of efforts, and trends
Data Driven DecisionsPatent Strategy and Analytics Services
What’s so special about patent analytics?
• Also from 1966 -”We have the choice of using patent statistics cautiously and learning what we can from them, or not using them and learning nothing about what they alone can teach us.” – Schmookler, Innovation and Economic Growth pg 56
Data Driven DecisionsPatent Strategy and Analytics Services
So why should organizational strategy be influenced by patent information • 80% of the information in patents is never published
anywhere else• “Eighth Technology Assessment and Forecast Report” –
USPTO, 1977• Actually, 95% of the substances from the patent
collection in CAplus did not have a corresponding non-patent literature reference associated with them
• “Over the next few years, we will either see the emergence of rational markets for patent trading, which have the potential to deliver trillions of dollars in value, or an opportunity lost as markets fail to engage effectively.” – AISTEMOS CEO Nigel Swycher
Patent information is required to make informed decisions about your company’s IP strategy
• IP strategy has to play a role in overall business strategy
• The two have to be considered simultaneously
• Patent information can provide input to establish business direction
• Who has Company Z assigned patents to without a press release or financial disclosure?
• Who are the major technology stakeholders in a given industry or within an industry vertical or segment? Are these the people I should partner with as I move into a new market?
• Should also run searches and perform similar analysis for chokepoint area – power consumption & Bluetooth connectivity for instance
• Early priorities for low power consumption and low power Bluetooth or alternative short distance communication standards will be very important in this area
• One way of viewing innovation strategy at a corporate level is by framing the discussion in terms of portfolio risk and diversification
• Executive staff and Board Members traditionally have a finance background and will immediately recognize the concepts of risk and diversification and how they apply to investment strategy
• A key attribute to identifying corporate goals and defining a strategy for leveraging patents within a company is deciding on the performance expectations associated with those assets
• Traditionally, in order to increase the amount of return or profit from an investment, a higher level of risk must be assumed by the organization
• The decision on how much risk is acceptable, weighed against the potential for gain from patent assets, should be made at the highest levels of a company
• In the best case this is done with understanding and approval from the executive staff and board
Growth potential and risk tolerance are corporate issues
• In the financial world, investors seeking steady, long-term growth use diversification strategies to buffer themselves
• They will select diversified asset classes, such as stocks versus bonds
• For example, traditionally, when one of the classes begins to decline, the portfolio is compensated for with an increase in the other
• Diversified financial portfolios also contain a mixture of investments where there is no correlation between the businesses associated with each
• Depending on how risk averse an organization may be, it will choose its financial portfolio to deliver an expected return with the least amount of risk
Diversification as a framework for patent strategy
• When examining a competitors portfolio look specifically at how much investment a competitor makes in each category
• Studying the mix of technologies pursued by a competitor can provide key insight into the level of risk they are willing to maintain while still concentrating on their core businesses
• Companies that have employed a long-term growth strategy with their patent portfolios can be identified by the level of diversification they pursue
Risk tolerance should be influenced by the competitive environment
• Companies can meet corporate expectations for returns on intellectual property and determine the right mixture of technology investments if they consider which combination of these categories they will try to achieve with their research initiatives
• Once the strategy is developed, it can be employed by both research managers and participants within the organizations patent committee to ensure that the resulting patent portfolios are maximized to achieve their stated objectives
Aligning the organization around a patent strategy