Anyone who has read through a patent knows just how tedious it can be to cut through the legalese and jargon to determine WHAT technology a patent is describing, let alone how valuable that technology might be. When you’re trying to find attractive IP in a portfolio of hundreds or even thousands of patents, any type of manual analysis becomes impossible.
As the number of patents continues to grow, cutting through the noise of irrelevant, or low-quality patents becomes critical to any effort involving IP. To help our users navigate this, we developed our own proprietary IP scores to help you quickly evaluate a patent or a group of patents. You will see these scores across our platform:
Search Results
Organization Profile
Patent Analysis
While there is no substitute for having a subject matter expert analyze a patent, our scoring tools are designed to help you quickly synthesize large numbers of patents and identify potentially interesting technologies that warrant that extra level of technical analysis.
Patents Strength:
Forward Citations: Patents are like academic publications in the sense that they cite other patents that cover the similar or foundational subject matter. By analyzing thousands of IP agreements, we found that portfolios of patents that are highly cited by other patents generate more value for their owners and any partners that are attempting to commercialize them. By analyzing these networks of citations, we can predict the impact a patent or portfolio has on a broader technology field.
Age: Understandably, newer patents are more likely to cover novel technology – especially in quickly changing areas like AI. However, patents tend to appreciate over the first few years of their lifecycle. Because challenges to patents’ validity typically happen in the first few years after they are published, patents that haven’t been invalidated after 3-5 years are particularly sought after as being defensible yet still novel.
Geographic Coverage: For a company looking to commercialize IP, it is critical to understand the countries in which the IP provides freedom to operate. Patents that provide coverage in more countries (especially large markets like the US, Europe, China, etc.) are often more attractive.
Family Size: Organizations often file more than one patent around a given technology. This may be to extend the utility of an invention to other use-cases, to cover auxiliary features, or to account for further development. Larger patent families require a higher level of investment and are typically more valuable.
Market Strength
When evaluating a portfolio’s commercialization potential, it is critical to look at the external market conditions. Even an unusually strong IP portfolio may be difficult to commercialize if interest and investment in the technology area are collapsing. To account for this, we use our technology taxonomy to analyze the global volume of new patents in a technology area, as well as the growth rate of new patents. Our approach to taxonomy tagging means that we can accurately assess cross-cutting patents that fall in multiple technology areas.
Takeaways
In a world of information overload (millions of patents containing paragraphs of dense technical data), organizations that can effectively prioritize and triage data will be best positioned for success. Whether you are searching for new technologies, benchmarking competitors, or developing your own commercialization strategy, our scores enable you to quickly target high-impact patents in high-growth technology markets.