1 December 2011PatentsRon Kaminecki

Patent information from centres of excellence

Instead of trying to locate a corpus of relevant documents, it may be useful to find a physical centre of excellence where work is conducted and then look for publications that come out of it.

A centre of excellence can not only be a great source of conference papers and printed publications, but also of expert witnesses or technical advisors with the equipment, facilities, or environment necessary to pursue pointed scientific research that may be relevant to a patent searcher. Occasionally there may be a piece of unique equipment at the site which could be used for further investigation in a patent dispute, for instance.

As an example, there is a school of mining at the University of Witwatersrand which is right next to one of the largest mountainous gold deposits in the world. The RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science location in Kobe, Japan, is the site of the world’s most powerful supercomputer. And why would the Nevada Desert Research Center be anywhere but in the middle of the Mojave Desert?

How do these research facilities relate to patents? Outside of the centres’ researchers obtaining patents based on their work, these centres focus the talents of the individuals and research money on equipment and the pursuit of the unknown, not to mention the infrastructure to allow expensive research to be conducted using specialised equipment.

Once a centre of excellence has been found, look into its research staff by name. If the centre is affiliated with a university, then the doctoral candidates can be checked. Most important may be identifying the faculty advisor who guided the research. Checking the author of a doctoral dissertation and any papers related to the author’s advisor may find prior art that could pre-date information found in a contemporary search.

Prior or future citations to the work of these scientists could be checked both for earlier publications that might be relevant and to help evaluate the worth of the study. Finally, these researchers can be a source of information as consultants since they may have more in-depth knowledge of their field and their reputations can be easily verified for use as experts.

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