AOCS

Industry

Non-profit professional organisation

Headquarters

Urbana, IL

Employees

30-60

The problem

Monitoring new plant protein patents that AOCS members would be interested in is tricky and time-consuming to do manually on free patent databases.

The solution

Scott has several PatBase Alerts running that he uses to extract weekly reports on relevant new patent publications. The PatBase export templates are especially useful to streamline downloading and sharing interesting new insights in the AOCS bulletin board and for writing a monthly column in a trade magazine.

“Many scientists are perplexed by patents […] they don’t understand them because they’re not written like a scientific paper”

Scott worked as a full-time Patent Agent at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), a large multinational food processing corporation, before joining the American Oil Chemists’ Society as the Director of Technical Services four years ago. At ADM, Scott used PatBase daily for about 8-10 years to run Freedom To Operate searches for clients. He also taught many scientists at ADM the fundamentals of patent searching and how to read and understand patent documents.

AOCS is an international non-profit professional organisation that advances the science and technology of oils, fats, proteins, surfactants, and related materials. They provide current and emerging information through various member channels, develop, and uphold methods of analysis used in global trade and research, facilitate interactions between professionals, and collaborate with other scientific societies and organisations.

After moving to AOCS, Scott got in touch with Minesoft about collaborating on a webinar about “Why are patents important to R&D?” the first Strategic IP webinar hosted by Minesoft. Since then, AOCS has benefitted from access to global patent data and the ease of use of the PatBase platform.

AOCS members are delivered valuable and timely patent data through a public bulletin board that is updated weekly with PatBase Alert results. These alerts monitor new patent publications and families related to plant proteins, a complex and active area of interest for many members. Scott only needs to use PatBase for about half an hour each week to extract valuable information for this weekly column. PatBase allows Scott to efficiently automate much of the weekly report, freeing up time for other work.

In addition, every quarter, Scott spends about half a day using PatBase to search and review IP related to broader topics. This research gets published in the AOCS print magazines, which includes abstracts of granted patents of interest to the industry.

The intuitive PatBase platform makes running topical weekly reports easy. Scott developed an efficient workflow that involves combining 3 search strings within the command line, saving the records into a folder and exporting the results in Excel using a pre-saved export template. Having a process that can be easily repeated speeds up the delivery of information to AOCS members.

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