Lawyer Monthly Magazine - February 2020 Edition

PATENT ANALYSIS Advanced Patent Analysis: Is It Needed? To answer the question above in short: yes. This month we speak to Ed White, Director of Patent Analytics at Derwent, who expands on how advanced patent analysis has changed the commercial sector and how innovators and companies can use such analytics to get ahead of the game. Expert Insight By Ed White, Derwent 40 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | FEB 2020 WHAT IS ADVANCED PATENT ANALYSIS? By using patent data as their primary source, advanced patent analysis (APA) allows Ed and his team to answer technical and competitive intelligence questions for his customers. This curated data and patent research allow those who are curious to know what their competitors are doing, in order to stay ahead of the game, and what direction their own business should be heading in. From patentability searches to analysing and sifting through thousands of patents and their related documents, the masses of data collected must be simplified in order for it to actually present effective results. HOW LONG DOES AN ADVANCED PATENT ANALYSIS TAKE AND HOW VALUABLE ARE THE RESULTS? The search itself takes around four to eight hours; more complex searches may take a few days. It would take two to three weeks to analyse and pick valuable insights from the search that will help your business on its next venture. The information produced is pretty valuable, as it can help you determine whether your next investment move is as clever as you think. Expanding on our previous example using VR: “Let’s pretend a cutting edge company wants to knowmore about VR, so if they ask us what is happening in the industry. The data we collect will present where the patents are being registered in the world and will allow us to determine all the different ways the industry is developing. Perhaps it is the optics, the software, the uses of VR (for gaming or military purposes), or the way the headset is structured and attaches to our head. If we can pinpoint what is changing, our clients will then be able to figure out what area of VR is worth honing in on.” HOW HAS PATENT ANALYTICS CHANGED? “I have witnessed changes over the past 15 years”, Ed tells us. “One of the biggest changes is that patent analysis has moved from simply counting the number of patents filed per year, into much more advanced metrics that lean on some of the complexity that exists within the international patent filing system.” Take virtual reality (VR) as an example here. Previously you may have noticed ‘Google has filed 25 patents in VR’ which was useful information 15 years ago, but today, the questions that will remain are: So what? Does it matter? Is it good?’, and we wouldn’t know what the answers to those questions are. Now, we are able to dig a little deeper and unveil that Google, for example, has filed 25 patents in VR, 15 of them were filed in the US in optics and software, two of them were filed in seven different countries and are getting cited three times a year, each of those being military VR headsets. Now you have suddenly worked out more about VR and Google using a public data source. Nowadays, data sources need to answer more questions which in turn provoke new questions; it is a lot closer to real world commerce and real-world technological direction in the IP patent world. WHY NOT JUST ‘GOOGLE IT’? The first thing that may prop up in your head is that trusty Google may be able to guide you and your business in the same direction. After all, we all have been victim to Googling almost anything and everything. But why is Google not enough here? In order to get the correct guidance and answers to questions about your business’ innovation, you need to get your hands on the data itself. As Ed told us: “Just looking at a few patents on google does not go far enough when it comes to patent analysis, especially when the average number of documents we look typically at is at least a few thousand patents. We have even answered questions looking at a few million records. “We need access to the data as we want to curate it, model it, structure it and manipulate it into data structures in terms of answering questions about it. "We also want to present it very clear to the customer. Any analysis is about distillation and by using google, you do not get simplicity, you get complexity.”