Recognising trends early – How patent data benefits SMEs

Published patent specifications are full of valuable information. Patent intelligence uses these patent libraries. An SME can use the knowledge gained from this information to assist in making decisions on strategic management. The requirements for these libraries are laid down in international agreements and national patent laws. In particular, the disclosure obligation defined in such agreements allows insights into technologies and business strategies 18 months after filing a patent application. This is information that normally can’t be perceived on the market at an early stage. Patent data is collected worldwide, processed according to standardised information in identical specialised databases, then made available to the public worldwide. These libraries of over 120 million documents therefore contain valuable technology and business data.

For decades, attempts were made to assign an absolute monetary value to individual patents by means of complicated calculations. Although this may have been possible in individual cases, it was more difficult for entire portfolios. Therefore, an attempt was made to generate a relative value that evaluates the patent in relation to other patents in the same technology field. Such approaches were for a long time promising, yet not convincing.

However, the latest developments in analysis tools and new qualitative indicators now make it possible to highlight the following information: technology trends, main areas of innovation within companies, industries and countries, technology leaders and their intellectual property (IP) strategies, technological positioning of companies and their changes over time, strengths and weaknesses of patent portfolios, competitors’ preferred markets, and much more. These qualitative, relative evaluations today provide accurate and meaningful results.

Analysing market behaviour on the basis of patents requires the clearest possible definition of the technology field to be examined, and sometimes of a specific geographical region or company (including all of its subsidiaries). To meet these requirements, a basic set of patents has to be compiled from the databases using a quantity sufficiently large enough to be able to make statistically relevant statements – in other words, at least several thousand.

The aim here is not, however, to analyse individual patents in detail, but to develop a basic set of relevant patent documents. This is usually the most complex step in the analysis. The basic set of patent documents can then be used to present trends and facts, i.e. answers can be found in graphs or in tables.

A strategic patent analysis of self-tracking wearables can be used to show how patent data can be processed. Whether a fitness app, a fitness tracker or a pedometer, self-tracking has become both a trend and an important market. The self-tracking wearable graphs shown here are only intended as an example of a possible analysis; they are not an in-depth analysis of this technology field. For this specific case, the composition of the basic set would have to be defined more precisely. In this analysis, however, the basic set consists of 3,720 active patent families. A family includes all patents from around the world for the same invention and from the same applicant. A single patent family represents an invention, no matter how many patent specifications the family consists of.  Counting the patent families, therefore, does not correspond to counting the patents, but to counting the protected inventions.

These are only some of the possibilities of analysing and portraying a technology field and competitors – and/or your own company – with the help of patent data. All data was compiled and displayed with the software Patentsight.