Page 78 - A&A Patents&Design Rewind-2016

PATENT ANALYTICS FOR FACILITATING BUSINESS

STRATEGIES

Modern business activities are becoming increasingly or which are contemplated to be used, as well as

competitive and organizations find themselves emerging players and sources of such developments.

compelled to continuously identify innovative The results can be used to identify new opportunities

methods to stay ahead of rivals and maintain or as well as locate threats to existing activities – all

increase their market share. Technology is playing an of which are vital to maintaining and growing the

increasing role in providing such innovative solutions business activity. As a result, such Patent Analytics

and the rapid pace of advancement in technology is studies are essential to the continued well-being

constantly generating new, improved solutions. Those and progress of the organization and therefore

businesses that are inherently technology-based necessary at appropriate times or intervals.

experience a higher degree of innovation sensitivity

as the swift pace of development penetrates even The total volume of published patents is estimated

the core activities of the organization. As a result, to be larger than 100 million, and it is known to be

a large percentage of organizations in the modern growing at a rate of over 2 to 3 million patents every

world find themselves involved in the use and/or year. Assuming an average patent-family size of 5/

development of technology-centric innovations. patent-family, this volume corresponds to greater

This unavoidable reliance on technology innovations than 20 million patent-families covering all the

makes it imperative for most business organizations, diverse technological fields. Total global filing trends

particularly the ones that are involved in technology show an increasing rate of filing in the past decade,

based operations, to keep abreast of the rapid pace and consequently, a large number of the patents are

of innovations in technology. in-force at any given time. Any attempt at analyzing

such a large set of documents presents a challenging

Most innovations in technology are revealed and task requiring special skills and tools for effective

protected through the mechanism of patents, which implementation.

incentivize and bestow a degree of exclusivity to

such activities. A paper from 19861, citing a report Patent Analytics is essentially a 3-step process:

from 1977, claims that 80% of the information found STEP-1: extracting the set of patent-families

in patents is not found anywhere else. This claim pertaining to the technical field of interest, from

is accurate owing to the known practice that most the global set of 20+ million patent-families à

organizations have of not publishing their research the “Data Extraction” step.

in scientific literature. This fact makes patent STEP-2: analyzing the extracted data-set for

information a very significant source of unique characteristics of interest à the “Data Analysis”

content that is vital to the understanding and study step.

of innovations in technology. STEP-3: portraying the results of the analysis in the

form of graphs and charts – this is necessary for

The results of a Patent Analytics study are intended revealing the results of the analysis, something

to facilitate a business organization’s formulation of that is not otherwise possible owing to the

plans for improving its competitiveness and avoiding large data volumes to be examined at the end

obstacles to the introduction of new capabilities. The of the analysis à the “Data Visualization” step.

plans could relate to existing business activities or

the exploration and strategy design of new activities. The intended scope of the analytics determines the

The study is expected to reveal new developments manner in which each of the above steps must be

in technologies that are either currently in use implemented. There are 2 major perspectives which

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