Patent Landscape Analysis
Conducting patent landscaping for a client is an opportunity to communicate information that can have a profound impact on your clients’ success in business. Patent landscapes are a vehicle for patent professionals to instill clients with a thorough understanding of their technological fields to help them make wise decisions about how to invest their time and money. Clients can leverage the information they gain from patent landscapes to identify areas of risk and opportunity, sort out competitors and potential allies, implement effective international patent filing strategies, and operate without infringing on existing patent rights. Patent professionals who provide patent landscape analysis services produce significant value for their clients; the LexisNexis® PatentSight® innovation analytics platform can be used to produce highly informative patent landscape reports tailored to your clients’ needs.
Understanding the evolution of a technology field
Patent landscape analysis offers a snapshot of the innovation happening in a particular technological field at any given time, but it can also tell the story of where technology is going, who is most involved and where innovation is taking place. In addition to providing the answers to these questions, PatentSight® analytics include objective, scientifically backed metrics that measure the impact of patented inventions, as well as the strength of entire patent portfolios. By conducting patent landscaping using PatentSight, patent practitioners can provide a more complete and accurate depiction of patent rights and technological evolution to help inform their clients’ operations, including research and development efforts and patent filing strategies.
Patent strength and Competitive Impact
Identifying your rival’s most valuable patents is an important step for determining their strengths and weaknesses. PatentSight uses a science-backed algorithm for evaluating the strength of a patent. The resulting metric, a patent’s Competitive Impact, takes into account a patent’s significance by evaluating how many times it has been cited by subsequent patents, as well as the geographic territories where the patent is protected and the market size of those territories. Users can use Competitive Impact values to make normalized comparisons of patents around the world.
Identifying competitors and allies
One of the most important hallmarks of a patent landscape analysis is that it reveals the key players who are operating within a defined technology space. For patent professionals, understanding which companies have been seeking patent protection around the world is a two-fold benefit—it can guide client competitive intelligence decisions by making clear which competitors are the biggest and best-positioned competitors, and it can help clients identify potential partnerships or licensees that would allow them to monetize their patent rights.
Patent filings by a single company often vary in their ownership designations, spellings and capitalizations, which has historically made it difficult to identify and evaluate such a company’s patent portfolio records. PatentSight patent records are reviewed for such inconsistencies, both manually and via software, to help ensure user analyses are conducted based on complete information. With more complete patent data and objective measures of portfolio strength, PatentSight patent landscaping tools facilitate the production of reliable and informative visualizations that allow users to quickly and deeply understand the strengths and weaknesses, rights and needs of other companies.
Evaluating patent trends on a global scale
Informed by patent records for over 13 million global patent families, patent attorneys who use PatentSight can conduct patent landscape analyses that are nearly worldwide in geographic scope. This translates into the ability to produce patent landscape reports that tell the story of patent filing trends and patent rights on an international level. PatentSight visualization tools make it simple to generate data-driven world maps, charts and graphs that clarify information used to develop effective international filing strategies, inform international marketing decisions and identify potential business opportunities around the world.
Learn more about PatentSight.
For more on patent landscaping read Value-Driven Innovation and Intellectual Property Management.
Access the article IP Landscape of Foldable Display Technology: What are the key players focusing on? for more in–depth information on identifying key players, competitors and allies.
Learn about common issues affecting open source patent data and the PatentSight approach to data cleaning with the Handbook for Patent Data Quality.
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