Creating a forward-looking patent strategy
The adage “If you don’t know where you are goin’, you will probably not wind up there” was one of the life lessons imparted by the eponymous hero of the movie “Forrest Gump” and summarises the goal of this article, which is to emphasise the power of front-end patent intelligence and its positive augmentation of a quality patent strategy.
Why are these disparate concepts related? Both recognise the importance of beginning with the end goals in mind and address issues which must be evaluated upfront to achieve this objective. If the objective is to ‘wind up’ with a strong patent portfolio then patent issues relating to developing innovations and patent procurement must be evaluated at the very beginning of research and development (R&D) and new product development—ie, it is essential to “know where you are goin’”.
Businesses must embrace the forward-looking and cost-savings advantages of patent landscaping, strategic and predictive invention, competitive intelligence, and life-cycle management in order to implement an optimal patent strategy at the forefront of the innovation process. This three-part series on providing a cost-effective and actionable roadmap to accomplish this objective focuses first on improving R&D through landscape research and strategic inventing.
Patent intelligence, when analysed from properly-designed patent landscape research, introduces strategic inventing, an approach that efficiently manages R&D and patent expenses by intentionally targeting an invention or product to improve the strength of a deliberate patent strategy. Specifically, the strategic objective is identified before the invention is made.
Strategic inventing could be used to (1) design around a competitor’s patent to ensure freedom to operate; (2) develop products by emphasising or deliberating enhancing patentable features to procure a patent; and (3) create multiple new inventions to build elements of a larger overall strategy, such as life-cycle management.
Express Search has recently published this report which can be downloaded for free at https://www.expresssearch.com/sample-results/landscape/.
How it works
To highlight this strategy, we conducted early-stage patent landscape research focusing on potential biological therapies for neurodegenerative diseases to detect patterns of global patenting activity and innovation directed to biological drug targets and therapies focusing on the underlying genetic and molecular causes of neurodegenerative diseases.
The search strategy began with a review of non-patent literature and other publicly available information on investment and collaboration activities as well as a broad sampling of the patent literature. From this knowledge a number of individual searches in global patent databases were performed using keywords, classes, assignees, and key inventors until we maximised the amount of relevant art and minimised the number of false positives.
The data were exported into our proprietary analytics database where patents were categorised to accurately reflect the underlying technology areas. The resulting patent strategy was designed by identifying emerging technology areas pursued by competitors or other industry players that aren’t currently competing in the product categories.
