Intellectual Property

  Patents serve as an early indicator of new technology, and businesses can gain valuable insights from patent searching and analytics from creation to monetization. Every year millions of patents are filed. According to a search conducted in PatSeer, 5.36 million patent applications were filed globally in 2018.   Patents enable you to identify new trends, how to maintain competitive standing in the market and quickly introduce new products.   Patent information is available for free in national and regional patent office databases. However, a commercial patent search software reduces the hours you spend searching different sources and allows you to access better data quality, translations, coverage and search functionalities. So it easier for you to discover meaningful relationships and make actionable reports with detailed insights. We will examine the main reasons why investing in a commercial patent database is useful for various stakeholders. Innovators – For c...

  Digital biomarker technology is used to collect and measure behavioral & physiological data to predict or influence health outcomes using implantables, digestibles, or wearables. Devices which use digital biomarkers include Apple Watches, FitBits, and Oura rings. According to recent research reports, the digital biomarker market is projected to be worth USD 24.5–25 billion by 2030 with a growth rate of 36–37% in the forecast period. To get a better impression of this fast-growing technology, we carried out a study to assess the country-wise dispersion of companies’ patents over the last 12 years. We constructed a search query in PatSeer using keywords for digital biomarkers and the pertinent CPC & IPC classes. The final search query yielded 3000+ patent families which were analyzed further to comprehend the top players and patent filing trends in every country. Patent filings of top companies across various jurisdictions We used PatSeer’s Geo-protection Growth Chart to vi...

  Artificial Intelligence (AI) is present in every field today, from art to music to finance to medicine. However, there is still resistance to AI being officially recognized as an inventor. Let's take a closer look at the latest developments concerning this topic. Inventions created with the help of AI over the last 4 years 1.       DABUS Stephen Thaler filed 2 European patent applications in 2018, which he said DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), an AI system, had invented. The DABUS case questioned traditional patent laws of inventorship. According to University of Surrey law professor and author Ryan Abbott, “We’re moving into a new paradigm where not only do people invent, people build artificial intelligence that can invent.” In 2019, USPTO rejected the patent applications saying that only humans can be recognized as inventors under the Patent Act. Between 2018 and 2019, Thaler filed patent applications in o...

  Quick and accurate patent categorization is important because it enables you to comprehend the   IP landscape of an industry. Manual categorization is tedious and takes hours. Occasionally it’s not possible to do because of insufficient subject matter experts. IPC and CPC classes are wide-ranging and might not match your categories. With these considerations in mind, we created PatSeer’s AI Classifier to reduce the amount of classification that has to be done constantly for technologies that you’re keeping tabs on. Built over the latest AI & NLP stack, the underlying Classifier model has been customized with semantic rules in ReleSense™ to achieve greater precision over patent and scientific literature. The AI Classifier can automatically learn from your existing taxonomy and the records you have categorized against it to make predictions for newer, uncategorized records. It supports hierarchical taxonomies and saves you the time and effort of manually classifying new re...

  The saying "Excel or die" is the foundation of product-oriented businesses. Companies that don’t spend money on breakthrough research face the risk of becoming obsolete. Many companies start with a set of innovative ideas on the basis of which they build differentiating products and achieve their initial success. Maintaining a competitive edge, however, may not be as easy as simply relying on past success and innovating around it. Improvement patents such as substitution inventions (replacing a product or process that is more efficient for the same purpose) and addition inventions (adding a component that wasn’t part of a product or process) are beneficial in boosting a patent portfolio, but it still remains crucial to keep an eye out for promising technologies that can dramatically alter the industry you’re a part of. This is the reason why companies should conduct technology scouting regularly. Technology scouting: what is it? Technology scouting is the identification, a...

The innovation lifecycle involves various stages of the innovation process, optimal conditions, and the appropriate time to utilize IP research and intelligence methods. This blog post highlights the process from a patent intelligence perspective and the professionals that are invaluable at every stage. Refer to the figure below to understand each stage of the product innovation lifecycle: Ideation This stage primarily involves generating new ideas which are then filtered based on a prior art search for patentability. Simply put, you need to ensure that the idea is novel, non-obvious and industrially applicable before proceeding to the next step, patent landscape analysis. For this evaluation, you must carry out a  patent landscape analysis  wherein you study the technology area such as its patent and assignee trends to gain insights on current technologies. Subsequently, you can conduct a  white space analysis  to validate promising technology areas with the ...

  If you need to record an enhancement to an invention that was featured in an earlier application, then you can choose to file a divisional patent application, a continuation-in-part (CIP) patent application or a continuation application. Patent of addition applications (present in New Zealand, Australia, and India) and divisional applications (available in China and Europe) bear similarities to CIP patent applications. However, in this blog post, we focus on highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the CIP patent application available in the U.S. The CIP patent application features new innovations related to the original (parent) application and is filed after it. Previously filed claims in the CIP application have the priority date of the parent application and claims that disclose new subject matter have a different priority date. If your invention has other embodiments, then your best bet is to file a CIP application to protect it better, which also strengthens your ...