The Patent Olympiad will be held in parallel with the CEPIUG 10-year anniversary conference in Milan, Italy. Minesoft is honoured to be able to support the competition with free use of our searchable global patent family database, PatBase, and sponsoring prizes. The event will be a great opportunity to bring recognition to the profession and the first of its kind, highlighting the fun, the challenge and the thrill of the hunt!

Contestants will have access to leading patent database, PatBase, relied on by IP professionals around the world. Having access to high-quality patent data is crucial to the accuracy and precision of any patent search and the data quality in PatBase is maintained by a close working relationship with the patent offices around the world. Thousands of error corrections are made to the data we receive and combined with additional information to add quality to the end file. This combined with the global reach of the data available – we now have 60 full text collections from countries around the world, with access to patent data from 106 countries overall – will provide a solid starting point for all contestants!

The Patent Olympiad was founded by four volunteers from the US, Canada, Scandinavia and Central Europe as a global networking event for anyone who does patent searching in their careers – not just mainstream “patent information professionals”.

“Ever since our first get together, one late night in Georgia, we’ve been working hard and looking forward to launching a new kind of IP event, the Patent Olympiad – a patent search contest that will test patent search skills whilst still being a lot of fun. See you in Milan!” Patent Olympiad founders: Andrea, Cathy, Linus and Nigel.

“Patent searching is difficult and time consuming. Blending the requirements of scientific research and multiple language searching in legal documents is not easy and we admire the participants hugely.” Ann Chapman, Minesoft Co-founder

Arranged in a 3-part format, the Patent Olympiad will cover Invalidity Searching, Prior Art Searching and a multiple-choice test on patent-related questions. Sign up today at: https://patentolympiad.org/