Thursday 2 November

Being in the payments space, we are often asked - "What patents do you file in the payments space? What's there to patent?". The payments industry is a fast evolving technological space constantly fueled by innovations. Behind a single payment transaction is a host of technologies at work connecting various parties involved, authenticating account holders, analyzing possibilities of fraud and providing recommendations. There are thus a multitude of patents related to the payments industry protecting the behind the scenes aspects of a payment transaction. In this talk, we would like to make the audience aware of some of these technologies and related patents.

A recent study commissioned by the EPO on the involvement of (patent) information in the innovation process in industry underlines the role of patent information in the various innovation stages. This result gives further impetus to the EPO's patent information strategy, aimed at supporting the economy by providing the access to a wealth of patent-related information, be it from its own patent granting process or its collection of worldwide bibliographic, legal status, procedural and full-text data.

In the presentation we highlight some key findings of the study and give an overview of the EPO’s patent information products and services. We will discuss how they can be used for technology-specific searches, for getting insight into the legal and procedural status of an application during and after its grant procedure, and for the statistical analysis of bulk data for business intelligence purposes. The talk covers the EPO’s free-of-charge Espacenet as well as our flagship product PATSTAT, both with a worldwide coverage. It also highlights the ever-improving European Patent Register and its accompanying services as well as our RESTful Open Patent Services.

The pharmaceutical industry is going through a turmoil with death of many block buster drugs, increasing number of filers on NCE, pricing war, and stiff generic competition. All the Pharma companies are pursuing a Paragraph IV strategy to be competitive in the market. The reality is any Pharmaceutical product can be challenged. First-to-file comes with many advantage but you have to strategize/execute well to become first-to-market and beat the competition. This can be taken care effectively by involving external Law Firms and Search providers in Product targeting, ANDA filing strategy & support, E-discovery, Court proceedings, etc. Here the presenter would cover a case study on how external collaboration would help companies save time, costs and yet increase the success ratio.

India has been in forefront by providing health care products at an affordable price. The success of Pharmaceutical generics showcases the significance of effective patent searching and data mining.  The emerging Biotech era has posed many challenges to comprehensive patent search. The nuances in patent searching in life science domain opens a plethora of aspects that one needs to delve in seeking accurate information. The Biotech patent information remains largely scattered as opposed to the organised analysis of patents available to chemical domain. The collation of information and the complexity begins right from the structure of the molecule to the final mechanism of action of these products. A cursory review of the aspects of searching life sciences patents enables one to evolve an insightful search.

Many people who start in patent information work believe that it is possible to become fully competent simply by gathering new facts about search sources, platforms or procedures.  Whilst this sort of knowledge certainly contributes to growing competence, it is not sufficient in itself.  The truly experienced professional is one who has been doing the job long enough to have encountered a variety of exceptions to the normal rules of search and retrieval, and who has learnt to identify and circumvent errors in an informed way.  In short, experience is gained more by making mistakes, and recovering from them, than it is by proceeding smoothly through the challenges of a routine search.  This presentation will give some examples of what a good searcher needs to have in their skill set, and why formal education will never prepare you for every eventuality

Patent data is a critical source of information to stimulate innovation and for competitive intelligence. Patents are often the first and only source of disclosure of a new invention and hence, ignoring them will only delay innovation and give an incomplete competitive intelligence picture. 

Delivered from the perspective of an experienced patent analyst, we will use case studies to describe the use of patent data to compile a competitive landscape, to stimulate innovation by learning from others and to help identify valuable IP in a portfolio. We will discuss the challenges in using patents for competitive intelligence and the recent innovative features and functionality in PatBase which can help, including: 

• Using thesauri, semantic and non-patent literature searching to compile a comprehensive competitive landscape
• The use of Analytics for customised, multidimensional analysis and to visually compare multiple datasets.   
• Text-mining to automatically identify and highlight concepts within any full text patent.
• Citation analysis to identify key competitors, collaborators or potential infringers. 

This presentation will demonstrate how any user can benefit from the innovative features and functionality in PatBase to interrogate and visualize the competitive landscape for any technical area.

A journey in the Dark Web, for companies looking to take control of their search strategy. Objective if this presentation is to prove that any reasonable cost, any organisation can setup its own search strategy, outside or in parallel of its document management strategy.

Challenge at French Ministry is to aggregate internal content, external content on social network (pinterest, youtube, facebook) and external legacy WebSite content (other Website from agency in relation with Ministry) and provide a brand new Web Site with "best of the bread" interface : search engine, auto completion and word correction, easy custom and secured navigation

Result is awesome, for a budget kept under control, we provided a new Drupal Module to monitor and configure Solr6 indexation and search engine, together with custom API to index external WebSite.

This session will come with a presentation of the Project Architecture (multi tiers servers) and a live demo of the Search interface