For most organizations, effectively patenting technology is only a small part of their IP strategy. The decisions you make about maintaining, growing, and monetizing your IP portfolio have significant implications for your ability to execute an effective IP strategy AND your ability to innovate and build strategic partnerships.
Our Project Builder helps you create portfolios of similar patents. In addition to grouping patents into a portfolio, projects provide powerful portfolio analytics and enable you to identify the most likely monetization partners for patents in a portfolio. Most importantly, you can use our projects to collaborate across large, complex teams to solicit patent feedback/analysis, discuss commercialization strategy, or make patent maintenance decisions.
Why Should I Create a Project?
While there are a number of reasons you might want to build a portfolio of patents, we have highlighted three use-cases that we encounter most frequently when helping our clients with IP strategy:
Monetization: Organizations with effective IP monetization strategies are perpetually evaluating new applications and existing grants to build licensing portfolios. These portfolios typically include a group of patents covering a similar technology area (e.g., beamforming or hydrogen storage). The larger the portfolio, the more likely you are to find partners willing to consider licensing.
Maintenance: Deciding whether to continue maintaining patents is a key part of effective IP management. For companies with hundreds or thousands of granted patents, maintenance fees can quickly reach $1M+. For research institutions, 80% percent of licenses are signed before the first maintenance payment, so making decisions about whether to maintain unlicensed IP is critical to freeing up technology transfer resources and prioritizing high-value IP for commercialization.
Technology Scouting: Whether you are a corporate technology scout looking for sources of external innovation, an R&D lead looking for researchers working on a similar subject matter, or an IP lead looking for prior art, building portfolios of IP that exists outside of your own organization is often necessary.
Getting Started
Step 1
Start by creating a new project. Click the Projects button in the Tradespace navigation tab, then click the new project button in the top right.
Step 2
Add a project name and a short description of the project. This will help you and your teammates easily keep track of multiple projects. Next, copy and paste a list of the patent numbers you would like to add to the project. Note: for best results, use the following format: US10477345B2. It is okay if you don’t know which patents you want to add at this point – you can always add more patents once you have created the project. Check out our Similar Patents article to learn how to use our predictive analytics tools to find more patents to add to your projects.
Once you have added patents, click next. If there are any patents the system does not recognize, you will have the opportunity to correct or remove the error.
Step 3
Add your teammates. To get the most out of your project, invite teammates so they can see Patents you’ve added, add their own patents, and make comments / add data to the project. If your teammates are already using Tradespace you can find them by starting to type their names. If not, you can invite them to join the project AND the platform by entering their email address.
Portfolio Analysis and Decision Making
Once you have created a project and added one or more patents you can start analyzing the portfolio.
Overview Tab: Aggregates data on all the patents in your project. Key Metrics include patent age, IP strength, market demand, forward citations, geographic coverage, and Inventors
Patents Tab: Here is where you can track all the patents you have added to the project. You can add or delete patents here, and comment on specific Patents. Use the Customize button to show hidden data fields or add custom columns to share with your team.
Partners Tab: For organizations interested in licensing or selling a portfolio, the partners' tab identifies the companies most likely to license the patents in the project.
Project Members Tab: At any point, you can add new members to a project by clicking the blue Add Members button in the top right of the Project Members tab. This tab also lets you keep track of all members currently collaborating on a project
Overview
Projects enable you to construct portfolios of patents to monetize, select patents to maintain or drop, and keep track of external IP. By adding patents to a project and inviting your team, you can create efficient workflows, improve your ability to solicit input on IP from across the organization, and ultimately develop a more effective IP strategy. Check out our article on Similar Patents for more tools to build effective projects.