An Overview of Patent Landscape Analysis

What is Patent Landscape Analysis? Why is Patent Landscaping Important?

Landscape analysis is a multi-step process that is aimed to parse through, organize and extract value or insights of interest from vast amount of information often scattered at different places across a variety of data sources. When this analysis is done for patents that is the scattered data is ‘patents’, this is called patent landscape analysis’. Patent landscape analysis provides insights into latest technological advances, scientific research, and innovations. A patent landscape analysis report consists of technical resources that are of interest and analytics based on this technical data providing important business and technology information deriving certain insights referencing the patent data and associated bibliographic information. This information provides a great value to large corporations, startups, universities, research institutions, investors, and researchers to understand deep into the area and make informed decisions prior to investing time and money into new technology and product development opportunities and/or research.

A patent landscape analysis done properly by a technical and patent expert who understands the technology under consideration and the laws of intellectual properly asset management and patent laws can create landscapes that are valuable and actionable. The information generated from a patent landscape can be used in patent advisory roles, research and development, setting directions for brain storming and innovation, developing novel technology, and to identify possible white spaces in technologies to invest in, and to derive insights about potential license opportunities, to design around others’ technology and avoid litigation/infringement. All this helps save a lot of time and money eventually though it may seem an extra spending on landscape projects in the beginning as the company may need to hire a patent landscape services company.

What are the steps involved in a Patent Landscape Analysis?

The basic idea of patent landscape analysis, also referred to as patent mapping, is to review and organize the patent activity in a particular technology domain. This involves a team of patent law expert, experts on intellectual property asset management solutions, technology experts, and sometimes subject matter experts where the stakes of technological investments are high in a company.

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Steps involved in generating a successful patent landscape report include such as:

• Any project of patent landscape starts with a patent search for data discovery. Search experts along with technology experts and patent specialists generate search strings to run them in patent databases and generate relevant data. This data is then extracted and an analysis is done to find relevant information out of this vast amount of extracted information. As much as 75% of the data may result in noise after this analysis. Affordable Maxinov Patent Search Services.

• The analyzed data is further studied for its categorization into various taxonomy classes which may be defined after a thorough discussion between landscape team and end-user (a corporation for example who decides to conduct this landscape).

• Patent filing charts are then created to enable you to visualize patenting trends over time. This also helps understand evolution of technology when these trends are counted in terms of various technology classes where the patents are clustered around. A good patent guy can really find extremely useful information from these charts and help derive important insights and valuable information for the end-user. The amount of change in patent activity in each technology, product, or application area over time can also be understood through these charts. This analysis is useful to understand how much growth has occurred in a particular area and how this growth has clustered in different technology niches, where are whitespaces, and predict about when this activity might start to fall off allowing the end-user to plan its patent strategy accordingly. This can be particularly useful if done along with market research covering market data, business data, and sales data.

• Top assignee charts are then created to provide insight into which companies, startups, universities, investors, and others are involved in the area. This is useful to identify potential partners, customers, collaborators, licensees, M&A targets, organizations that might be using your technology and could be a reason to file a claim for, potential areas of freedom to operate with respect to certain companies who may otherwise be considered competition, and other related information about patent owners in the field of interest. This can be combined with market and business research to understand spending of different key companies in certain technology areas, their investments, business expansions around the patented technologies, R&D spending in certain technology areas and compare it with other competitors in the same area.

• Depending on the end-user needs, additional steps can be performed for visualizations through graphics and software-enabled tools to provide insights into key innovators, their technology specifics, clustering of the patents around certain innovation themes in target technological spaces, whitespaces identification to allow an end-user to determine areas of increased investments and efforts focus relative to other areas, particular niches that are more lucrative in the near future using predictive models and well as manual analysis involving subject matter expert guidance. These graphic visualizations can be useful in a variety of ways such as developing effective marketing tools, defining a patent strategy and non-patent scientific research objectives, performing competition and technology intelligence, etc.

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If you want to talk about how a patent landscape project can help your company needs, feel free to contact us. Write to us to get a free advice from our patent expert or understand pricing schedule for a typical patent landscape project in your technology area of interest.