Friday 3 November

White space mapping helps businesses discover unserved markets that hold potential but do not have any products or services yet. With patents, the goal is to find promising technology areas where patents can be filed in order to strengthen ones portfolio or purely to block others. As the practice is not new, several techniques and visualizations are being used for Patent White space analysis. Using 3D Printing as an example, this presentation will focus on pitfalls in various approaches and recommend best practices for aligning the outcome of the white space analysis to your business objectives.

China has grown to the largest publishing authority. However, the question has been whether this was real or inflated. As we are now starting to learn that it was in fact inflated, times will be changing. With a continuing challenge of keeping up high volumes of publications, will China now take its real position in the IP space, and start reflecting publications that really show the countries innovation skills?

Classification Codes in a patent document are given by Examiner. Due to time constraint and background/interest of the Examiner, some classification codes which could have been applied to the patent document are not applied. Though patent searchers know the inadequacy in searching Classification Codes, at times it is a useful field for focussed searches. Analysis of retrieved patent documents by Codes, Codes by Year and Codes by Assignee is typical but may not really represent the dataset truly. Here the presenter makes a case of Classification Codes and proposes solutions that would improve reliance on search and analysis of Classification Codes.

Patentable Subject matter, list out the controversial inventions ineligible for patent registration. These inventions are related to genetic modification, software patents and business methods etc. which have been debated on national, international levels at various conventions. Currently, there are multiple patent litigation reported under patentable subject matter and are prosecuted with different perspectives. However, these inventions despite meeting the criteria are still been prosecuted based on patentable subject matter. The presentation would discuss some of the famous case studies in the area of genetic modification both at level of inventions and discovery. Further, more emphasis is focused toward the recent patent case on gene discovery of Myriad Patent litigations. There by address the critical question whether “patentable subject matter” is actually satisfying the current upcoming technologies assessment or acting as an impediment for future innovations. In other words, dose patentable subject matter stifle the growth of latest upcoming technologies which could emerge as future breakthrough innovations!

IP Landscape study is integral part of any R&D planning, devising future strategy, to understand competition, assess early threat/opportunity etc. Enormous efforts and time is required to analyze large set of patents manually. It can vary from anywhere between 2000-200000 records. There are many smart tools and databases to do it automatically with generation of few dynamic charts and heat maps. However, the accuracy is not very high based on our comparative analysis.

Studies were carried out at MC, on with and without the use of automated IP tools for comparing and evaluating the accuracy. Post that, MC has designed its proprietary workflow which gives automatic tool like efficiency but with Human like quality. We apply this workflow  with end objective of identifying trending/key technology, top players, key companies in each sub-technology area, top countries, various trends based on timeline etc. Overall output helps the client in getting the top view with actionable intelligence. The study can be carried out in 50-70 hours/one week time of effort irrespective of domain, without compromising on quality. Here the presenter would cover few case scenarios to showcase the unique “MC-WAY". 

With a rapid increase in the patent and non-patent literature- there is always a chance that we miss some important patent due to the complexity with which they are being reported. This is critical in prior art, Freedom-to-Operate, Infringement searches. 

In this session, we will showcase case studies on how value added databases will help identify evasive information such as incompletely defined substances, chemically modified bio-sequences, prophetic substances, Markush structures, numeric properties discussed in Patents and NPL. 

Case studies will be presented using STN ®–an online platform with over 100 techno-scientific databases. Over 95% of the world’s patent applications are reviewed by patent offices that use STN.

With growing competition and the constant fear of being struck by disruption, it’s becoming increasingly tougher for corporate R&D departments to strategize research vis-à-vis stringent budgets. Avoiding re-inventing the wheel further poses to be an on-going challenge. In-house IP teams today largely adopt a reactive approach in which they tap ideas and inventions resulting from R&D and pursue patent protection. It would be beneficial if IP teams provide a proactive assistance to R&D teams and assist them in channeling R&D in the right direction. The presentation discusses how in-house IP teams can build an organized patent information database for R&D teams and guide them. The database can act as a common platform for which the R&D folks can have easy access to get the required technical information. Inventors can benefit from the insights received through such an organized database and can better understand the existing state-of-the-art. The presentation further discusses ways in which the database can be exploited for taking strategic R&D decisions.  

Recent trends in intellectual property around protecting green energy innovations are captured. Patent filing activities are collected worldwide in recent years and these activities are mapped geographically. Highlights from top active players are presented who are filing large number of patents in this technology domain and their collaborations with academics. Moreover, major economies in the world are promoting green energy innovations through reducing fees and less stringent conditions for filing patent applications. Those regional promotional activities are highlighted here, so that more and more research activities in green technology may enhance in coming future.