Finding the right knowledge management solution

For any innovation-driven industry, it’s crucial to be aware of the IP landscape in your technology area. For example, consider the fact that 70 to 80% of scientific and technological information is available only in patents—by not monitoring this effectively, how much actionable intelligence is your company missing out on?

The rate of new inventions has continued to increase in 2018, with China at the forefront of the rise in global patent applications for 2017. Knowing and studying global patent data is an effective tool to avoid parallel developments and wasted R&D efforts in overcrowded research fields. By ignoring and/or undervaluing IP, businesses can be driven into risky situations, such as opening up your company to infringement proceedings which could result in further loss of profits and harm your long-term corporate ability to survive, or the possibility of competitors taking advantage of your own technological innovations.

Patent knowledge management

IP knowledge management processes help to avoid or mitigate these challenges by providing a system to monitor the IP landscape and direct relevant documents between departmental experts in a configurable manner that suits a range of scenarios.

Patents are indicative of modern innovation trends. In addition, they contain important technical information as applicants must describe and explain their inventions in a clear and complete way. Hence, the core requirement of IP knowledge management systems is frequently to ensure that a company’s R&D team is kept aware of emerging trends and the actions of the competition, ensuring that their current projects are “on trend” while avoiding potential duplication.

Many available patent databases already perform this function, with the ability to set up alerts which monitor new applications and granted patent documents as they occur and send out the pertinent information to approved recipients.

However, the quality of the underlying searchable database of patents is going to have an effect on decision-making, and only a few companies worldwide have concentrated their efforts on this niche, challenging, detailed sector. IP knowledge management tools have the functionality to take this workflow further, involving other branches of your organisation and therefore facilitating knowledge-sharing across multiple departments.

For example, once the results of an alert have been reviewed by the technical teams, specific records can be forwarded to the legal department if a member of the technical team believes that a potential breach has been identified. Alternatively, identified competitor action, as foreshadowed by newly published patents, might be forwarded to the executive branch to inform a future offensive or defensive strategy to counter emerging threats or capitalise on opportunities to outmanoeuvre competitors.

Internal documents such as search or examination reports, case studies or value-added information like commercial reports on a specific assignee can be linked to a patent family, providing additional insights beyond the patent data alone.

Minesoft’s knowledge management solution—Pat-KM—is adaptable to the customers’ needs. Pat-KM incorporates internal company workflows and custom taxonomies to help manage patent knowledge globally throughout the organisation. Our “off-the-shelf” system is relied on by some of the world’s best-known and leading companies.

Pat-KM can be thought of as a comprehensive software solution overlay on the data available in PatBase, granting your users the benefit of access to the wide range of search and analysis tools available within the PatBase system, as well as the additional fields and rules set up for your personal archive. Users can benefit from access to comprehensive, shareable and searchable legal status information, citation tracking tools, high-quality machine translations and more.

Transforming the workflow life cycle

Patents offer a well-codified, fully searchable and readily available pool of competitive intelligence waiting to be exploited. Those diving in are faced with challenges of volume and accessibility, but perseverance and employment of specialist databases and advanced knowledge management systems, such as Pat-KM, that automate many of the processes, will pay off in terms of the wealth of insights gained.

Let’s imagine that Company X is preparing a project to break into a new technology area. A freedom to operate (FTO) search has already been completed and determined that there are currently no existing patents that will be infringed by the new invention.

With the deployment of Pat-KM, the knowledge management team can work alongside the technical team to set up relevant alerts for the new technology area they are entering; these alerts can continue to monitor the area to ensure that high-risk patents aren’t being granted in jurisdictions of interest. Should a new patent emerge before the project is complete, it may well be more cost-effective to abandon the internal project and seek a licence rather than continue and risk infringement in key jurisdictions!