Covered in This Patent Landscape Analysis Guide:
What is a Patent Landscape Search?
Patent landscape reports are a popular search report intended to provide an overview, or landscape, of the patents covering a particular type of technology. These are also sometimes called “state of the art” and generally take 1-2 weeks to complete, covering between hundreds or thousands of patent families. They are a critical step in any company’s patent lifecycle and have a variety of uses.
“Patent landscape reports (PLRs) provide a snap-shot of the patent situation of a specific technology, either within a given country or region, or globally. They can inform policy discussions, strategic research planning or technology transfer. They may also be used to analyze the validity of patents based on data about their legal status.”
Source: WIPO
Some Common Uses For a Patent Landscape Search
- Understanding the current competitive landscape
- Predicting where your market is heading
- Identifying acquisition, licensing, targets, or collaboration opportunities
- Spotting trends in your space to aid investments
- Defining and discovering whitespace
- Finding inventors active in a particular area, for headhunting and recruiting purposes
6 Easy Steps for Patent Landscape Analysis
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before starting the patent landscape analysis or search process, it is important to understand why you want to do patent landscaping activities and to define your goals of the process in advance.
These goals are key to do before you get started with your patent landscape analysis, as depending on what the end goal is, you may want to address some or all of these key questions while conducting your patent landscape search.
Some key questions to think about before you start your patent landscaping search are:
- Is this a growing area of interest?
- What are the fields of current interest?
- Who are the key players?
- Where are the key players filing their inventions?
- Who are the “key opinion leaders” in this field?
- What is the legal status of the families in this area?
By asking yourself these questions, you can make your patent landscaping much more focused, which will help to not only speed up the process, but also should result in the information you find being much more relevant and helpful to you.
Step 2: Develop a Broad Overview
Before getting started with the patent landscape searching process, doing some general research around the subject matter is essential. Preparing by studying some basic literature will generally allow you to gather some high-level keywords, as well as identifying key patents that are associated with the technology you’re landscaping.
Basic online research searching for a few overall keywords, or for companies known to be active in an area, can uncover helpful articles and background information to help prepare for a comprehensive search strategy. Furthermore, having a clear understanding of the area you’re investigating is critical when analysing the final landscape and answering the key questions mentioned above in step 1.
Like with thinking about your goals with patent landscaping, this preparation and initial research will result in a much more focussed and efficient patent landscape search workflow.
Step 3: Define Your Initial Search Strategy
After your preparation phase, you’ll need some time to devise a comprehensive search strategy. Generate general keywords used for the specific technology, and build on that.
The three core areas you’ll be looking into are:
- Keywords
- Classifications
- Active assignees and inventors
Keywords, Inventors & Assignees
Searching some basic keywords in your patent database in the title, abstract and claims
will identify additional relevant keywords, inventors and active assignees (generally the
company who has filed for the patent) for your initial search. Additionally, a statistical
analysis of the IPC and CPC codes used to classify the initial answer set will help to
identify relevant classifications to add to the search strategy.
Subject Matter
After developing a comprehensive search strategy, encompassing keywords, classification
codes, assignees and inventors, the search results should be focused on the subject
matter of interest in a number of limitation steps. This process is difficult and needs to
be checked at every step, in order to be sure that relevant records are not eliminated.
Geographical Area
Limiting by geographical area, removing utility models and design patents, removing
irrelevant patent families identified by acronyms which are used in multiple technology
areas, and limiting by publication years are all examples of ways you may limit your search.
Step 4: Run The Initial Search
After you’ve compiled a solid search strategy, it’s time to run your initial search. What your search string actually looks like will depend on the database you’re using. However, it should encompass:
- Keywords
- Key assignees
- Key inventors
- Full-text searches
- IPC codes
When your results come back, take a quick review. At this point, you’ll be able to see what percentage of your answer set reveals relevant answers to determine if it’s enough for a reliable patent landscape analysis. Typically, if it’s 80% or more, your search strategy is sound.
At this point, you should also confirm that the most important patents in the area are included, and sort your answer set by the most cited to further confirm the most cited publications in the area you’re landscaping. Assuming your initial set doesn’t meet your criteria, you’ll need to adjust your search accordingly.
Step 5: Analyse and Optimise Your Patent Landscape Search Strategy
After you’ve completed the initial search you’ll need to identify additional keywords, relevant classification codes, active assignees and inventors in the area and exclude additional potential sources of irrelevant results, enabling a more comprehensive and clean final landscape search.
Some tips to do that:
- Review classification code definitions for additional keywords.
- Review the title and abstract of key patents for additional keywords.
- For CPC and IPC classifications, use the codes from the basic keyword answer set to focus your landscape.
- Identify the most frequently occurring assignees and inventors, ensure that areas in which they are working are relevant by investigating their patent portfolio and websites, and then be sure to include their patent portfolio in your final landscape.
- Use advanced features in your patent database, such as analytics, advanced keyword highlighting and text-mining to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the review of patents within your landscape search.
Step 6: Clean Up, Visualise and Review
Clean Up
Once satisfied with the answer set, clean it up by grouping assignees together, removing patents in areas that are irrelevant and deduplicating the answer set to focus on patent families within which all publications describe the same invention.
Visualise
Next, generate statistical graphs to visualise your landscape search. Viewing the data from a number of angles (jurisdiction, year, assignee, inventor, etc.) and at multiple levels (families, priorities, applications, grants, etc.).
Review
Consider if you can quickly come up with the answers to these key questions and easily draw some conclusions:
- Is this a growing area? – This can be easily identified by viewing the breakdown of the number of patent publications, patent families or granted documents over time.
- What are the current fields of interest? – The fields of current interest can be identified by identifying the top IPC and CPC classification codes which will signify the areas in which most patents are being filed. An alternative is to review the most frequently occurring keyword concepts, which can quickly identify key fields being actively pursued.
- Who are the key players? – Analysing the landscape for the most occurring patent assignees can identify the key players and can identify potential collaboration or acquisition opportunities.
- Where are the key players filing their inventions? – Simply identifying the key jurisdictions in which the top players are filing their inventions allows you to identify the key markets where patent protection is being sought.
- Who are the “key opinion leaders” in this field? – Analysing the landscape for the most occurring inventors allows you to identify the key opinion leaders who could be your next employee or partner in developing a technology.
- What is the legal status of the families in this area? – By simply reviewing the landscape by legal status, you can quickly identify if this area is being actively pursued, where most of the patents are in force or being actively prosecuted. If the area is of lesser interest, you can see where most patents have expired or been withdrawn.
Tying back your visualisation and reporting to your goals ensures you stay focused on your goals.
The Challenges of Patent Landscape Analysis
Patent landscape searches and analysis are often complex processes, and as such, can present several challenges that you need to be aware of and prepared for, such as the time needed or data inaccuracies.
- Patent analysis is often a complex process that can take up a lot of time, due to the nature of having to find and review large quantities of patent data.
- It is important to remember that there may be inherent limitations and uncertainties in patent data—for example, the delay between when a patent is filed and when it becomes publicly available.
- Another factor to consider is how data is presented and formatted, in order for the rest of your team to be able to understand it quickly, and then be able to use it effectively.
- It is also worth noting that patent data is always subject to change, and may be updated in the future. This is particularly important as more global changes can indicate trends in the overall patent landscape.
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