The importance of patent information for the innovation economy

Patent information plays an increasingly important role in global technological and economic development. Patent documents represent a rich and often unique source of legal, business and technical information, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) estimates that up to 70 percent of the technical information found within patent documents is not published anywhere else.

Although the legal protection afforded by a patent is territorial, the information contained in a patent document is global, disclosing brand new technologies to any person or organisation around the world.

Since 1996 Minesoft has been developing solutions to help corporations, IP law and patent attorney firms and information specialists capture this vital patent knowledge. While many national and regional patent offices provide free online tools for accessing their patent collections, Minesoft and other commercial providers identified the need for value-added subscription-based patent information services.

Such services can enhance the efficacy and accuracy of patent information retrieval and review, with the addition of features such as aggregated content, cross-lingual search capabilities and integrated analysis tools. Enabling the IP community to effectively search, review, analyse, and monitor patent information is crucial in driving innovation forward.

Challenges of global patent data

The sheer volume of patent information available today can be daunting when embarking upon a search. According to the WIPO Intellectual Property Indicators Report 2013 edition, IP filing activity is growing at levels exceeding those seen prior to the global financial crisis of 2008, with patent filings increasing at their strongest rate in nearly two decades. The number of patent grants issued worldwide in 2012 exceeded the one million mark for the first time, with the US, Chinese and Japanese patent offices accounting for 80 percent of this global growth.

Online patent search tools such as PatBase—the global patent database developed by Minesoft and RWS Group—have made the exploitation of these huge quantities of patent information more time and cost-effective, but challenges remain to effectively harnessing the power of patent information. One of the greatest obstacles is the language barrier.

According to the same WIPO report, continued rapid filing growth in China is the main driver behind the overall global increase in patent filings. Significant growth was also reported at the IP offices of the Russian Federation, Mexico, Brazil and Germany, among others—all of which means increasing quantities of patent data published in many different languages.

"it is only through the use of increasingly sophisticated patent review, analysis and monitoring tools that the information can be turned into actionable knowledge."

PatBase, launched a decade ago, was the first Western searchable patent system to provide a non-Latin language search engine, allowing users to conduct searches in their native language across the extensive non-Latin patent collection. Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean and Thai full-text collections can be queried in the native language, while English-speaking users can also search across the large collection of stored English machine translations to retrieve patents.

Many patent databases today facilitate searching in different languages, and PatBase incorporates sophisticated cross-lingual search tools, some developed in cooperation with WIPO, as well as providing the search interface itself in different languages. PatBase is currently available in English, Japanese and Chinese, while the Express version comes in seven languages.

The next step

Visualisation and analysis is increasingly a crucial part of a patent search. While having access to comprehensive patent information is important, today’s users are demanding more from a patent database. Organisations need to be able to extract relevant and meaningful information and visualise trends from patent data in order to make strategic decisions.

Since patent documents are purposely drafted to be difficult to interpret, it is vital that tools exist to help understand patent search results. The need to carefully and manually read through the patent document will never disappear, particularly for patent legal professionals, but automatic patent analysis can be useful to obtain a rapid overview of technology trends or competitor patenting activities.

The main commercial patent databases currently on offer have developed integrated patent information analysis tools, allowing analyses to be performed directly on retrieved patent search results. At the end of 2013, Minesoft and RWS Group announced the launch of PatBase Analytics, allowing predefined analysis templates to be applied to up to 100,000 records at one time.

The new module allows competitor and product analyses to be performed directly in PatBase, without needing to extract data for use in third-party patent-analysis software. As with other patent analysis solutions, large amounts of complex patent data can be quickly analysed and represented in a graphical way that is easy to understand and has a visual appeal ideal for inclusion in reports and presentations (see Figure 1). Standalone patent analysis software also exists for information specialists wishing to carry out more in-depth analyses, and most patent database providers will support links to directly export search results from their databases into third party tools such as Intellixir or VantagePoint.

Whether it is in-built analysis tools or dedicated software, patent information analysis—or ‘patinformatics’, as it is also known—enables users to gain valuable insights that can lead to faster decision-making and inform business strategy. Trends and relationships on a macro level can be uncovered that would not be perceptible when working with patents on a document by document basis.

Keeping track

While analysis of patent information provides a snapshot in time (or over a period of time) for a technology area or a competitor patent portfolio, ongoing monitoring of patent information offers a way to maintain current awareness and ensure competitive advantage in the marketplace.

In the past, tracking the status of patent applications (either a company’s own filings or its competitors’) presented a time-consuming manual task but web-based monitoring services are available that have automated the process. Minesoft’s PatentTracker tool, for example, tracks changes to a variety of patent registers and automatically sends an email alert whenever there is any change to the status of a patent application or a patent family. The service runs on the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), EPO, UK, German and Canadian patent registers and on the International Patent Documentation Center (Inpadoc) patent family and legal status service, carefully checking details of each patent application or patent family record every week.

Services such as PatentTracker allow organisations to keep a broad international watch on any patents of interest, follow a patent application’s progress through the grant procedure, and track third-party patents to assess risks posed to their business.

Legal status is an element of patent information that is playing an increasingly important role. As patent sales and licensing deals and patent infringement cases regularly dominate world news, the need for accurate and interpretable legal status data is more important than ever, although the data itself is very complex. Legal status has long been problematic for patent database providers, with sparse data availability and collection creating a barrier to providing up-to-date information, and different patent laws in virtually every country making it challenging to create a homogenous product.

In an effort to simplify legal status information for users, sophisticated legal status tools were introduced to PatBase in early 2014, including a timeline that provides a fully interactive graphical display of legal events occurring over the current lifetime of a patent. Patent information providers continue to work on developing ways to make legal status information more accessible to searchers, but ultimately they can only work with the information made available from the various patent offices.

Searching the vast quantities of patent information from around the world is just the first step in exploiting its potential as a vital business, legal and technical resource. Commercial providers such as Minesoft capture and add value to global patent information, but it is only through the use of increasingly sophisticated patent review, analysis and monitoring tools that the information can be turned into actionable knowledge.

Developing ways that enable patent information users to extract and share better insights from patent data plays a vital role in an innovation economy.

For more information, visit www.minesoft.com, email info@minesoft.com or telephone +44(0)208 404 0651.

Ann Chapman is the co-founder of Minesoft. She can be contacted at: ann@minesoft.com

Katy Wood is global marketing manager at Minesoft. She can be contacted at: katy@minesoft.com