Many hands make light work

Using crowdsourcing for prior art searches enables researchers to unearth information that might otherwise be tricky to find. WIPR reports.

They say that too many cooks spoil the broth. Too many people, regardless of expertise, don’t always produce the best end product. Patent owners know this, and it leads some to pick a small team of specialist researchers when enquiring about a patent’s validity. Essentially, they trust a select few.

But if too many cooks spoil the broth, many hands might also make light work. Article One Partners (AOP), a company that coordinates worldwide research on prior art, prefers a crowdsourcing model.

Using 22,000 researchers, hailing from 180 countries, the company aims to match clients’ requests by spreading its wings far and wide. The world is its oyster.