From Filing Cabinets to Boardroom Staples: How the Evolution of Intellectual Property Departments Led to the Development of LexisNexis PatentSight+  

Not too long ago, Intellectual Property (IP) departments were not considered a core business function, limiting their role to the filing, maintaining, and protecting the organization’s IP. However, rapidly advancing technology and innovation and the blurring of the boundaries between different technologies have created a complex innovation landscape. This is further compounded by the massively growing number of patent filings over the years, making it difficult for IP professionals and business leaders to maintain a comprehensive overview of developments in each market and differentiate valuable innovations from the rest. As the global industry evolves, there has been a notable shift from locally concentrated competitors to a broader, more global mix of companies entering traditional spaces. In this swiftly changing environment, the significance of these once-overlooked functions has also evolved, and IP teams are growing to become strategic advisors embedded deeply in business operations and long-term planning.  

This transformation in the role of the IP department didn’t happen in a vacuum. The development of advanced platforms like LexisNexis® PatentSight® has helped to fuel an age of data-driven decision-making. By combining quality data and easy-to-understand visualizations, such tools have helped IP departments navigate the complex patent landscape with business-critical insights and now, with the introduction of PatentSight+, continue to push the needle forward on bringing clarity to innovation.  

Here, we take a journey through the evolution of IP analytics, discovering how insights from patent analytics have grown to help IP teams advise their leaders by providing a wealth of critical business insights, including for competitive benchmarking, licensing negotiations, M&A due diligence, etc. Read on to learn more. 

The beginning of the age of advanced innovation analytics 

PatentSight resulted from a university team’s research into trying to answer the “quality problem” concerning patents. This research resulted in a unique approach to measuring patent quality and overall portfolio strength with scientifically developed measurement tools. The early days of PatentSight were a spin-off from this university project. It is in this research that they first introduced the world to the Patent Asset Index, a revolutionary metric that offered a nuanced look at patent quality and value.  

After initial success working on consulting projects for global Chemical industry giants, the founders launched their first Business Intelligence software, PatentSight, in 2012. The platform is based on high-quality patent data and combines Machine Learning with human researchers to maintain high data accuracy standards. By combining world-class data with easy-to-read charts, this approach enabled users to create visually appealing, insight-rich graphs and charts. These tools helped simplify complex IP topics, making them more understandable for stakeholders who do not have an IP background.  

IP teams soon realized the potential of advanced patent analytics and portfolio quality metrics to provide granular insights to guide their R&D strategies, advise on M&A activities, and perform portfolio optimization. Tools like PatentSight enable core IP activities such as competitive intelligence and benchmarking, portfolio optimization, and more by bringing together highly curated and enriched datasets, cutting-edge analysis tools with streamlined workflows, and powerful visualization capabilities, all within a single platform. These analytical advances mean that IP teams can focus on more business-critical tasks and perform better under resource constraints.  

In 2018, recognizing its potential to simplify the complexities of the IP landscape as it became more intertwined with overall business strategy, LexisNexis Reed Tech acquired PatentSight and added it to its roster of IP solutions.  

Upscaling the IP department’s role with impactful communication and visual narratives 

One of the less heralded yet crucial components of IP management is communication. Just as IP departments have evolved to become part of a broader business strategy, how they communicate insights and findings has had to advance. In 2021, PatentSight released one of its most impactful features, a revolutionary patent-to-U.N. SDG mapping that reveals insights into the role of innovation in addressing the global challenges of achieving sustainability.  

On a business level, these insights help organizations align their patent portfolios with a universally accepted target, the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. With easy-to-understand charts and graphs that prove a company’s commitment to sustainability, insights from the PatentSight SDG-to-patents mapping have already been leveraged by global leaders like Merck KGaA in their sustainability reports.  

The ability to create impactful visual narratives in a few clicks with easy-to-understand charts and quality metrics that are mathematically proven aligns perfectly with the modern IP department’s need for clarity, agility and adaptability. Below are a few examples of how IP analytics have helped IP departments perform their traditional roles more effectively and empower them to evolve into strategic units capable of influencing corporate decisions: 

• Competitive intelligence & benchmarking  

• Disruptive technology scouting 

• M&A due diligence and R&D and innovation tracking 

• Sustainable innovation analytics 

• Risk assessment 

• Licensing & SEPs 

From filing cabinets to boardroom staples: Enhancing the IP team with the all-new PatentSight+  

In this era characterized by high-paced innovation, complicated technology overlaps and quicker lab-to-market timelines, we are stepping up the analytics capabilities with the new PatentSight+. This signals a new dawn for IP departments; by harnessing highly curated, enriched data sets and leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing with compelling visualizations, PatentSight+ will continue to foster a new era of IP strategy. 

More data, more insights: With the addition of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) declaration data and expanding the already large patent database with data from additional patent offices, PatentSight+ delivers the most meticulously curated database of patent data. 

AI-powered actionable insights: Last year’s acquisition of Cipher AI has boosted the classification capabilities in PatentSight+, which means more customized and detailed analyses. 

Export and present: This new capability brought to PatentSIght+ allows teams to upload custom design templates and export presentation-ready PowerPoint decks.  

The continuing evolution of intellectual property and business interconnection 

As we look into the future, it’s evident that the transformation of IP departments and the platforms supporting them, like PatentSight+, is an ongoing process. The interconnection between intellectual property and broader business strategies will continue to strengthen, paving the way for a future where the power of IP is harnessed in ways that are yet to be fully explored and imagined. The journey from filing cabinets to boardroom staples is not just a historical transformation; it’s an ongoing narrative shaping the future of innovation and business worldwide.  

If your team is faced with resource restrictions and is looking for ways to improve overall efficiency and quality of communication, we would love to get to know you and show you some invaluable insights into how IP analytics can support your team in their efforts: 

• Let’s have a conversation about your current priorities in IP analytics. 
• Get an external view of your portfolio. 
• Learn how others see you and survey other market players from a new perspective. 

To learn about PatentSight+, schedule a call with us here.