Corporate IP practitioners, both managers and analysts have IP needs that are different from external consultants and IP Analysis service providers.

Chances are if you are corporate IP practitioner, when you initiate IP research for a new product/technology area, mapping intellectual-property is just one aspect of analyzing IP and a lot of your day to day IP research work besides patent searching would involve:

• Creating different kind of Excel or Word summary reports that help communicate patent and journal information between the you, R&D and management
• Coordinating processes and material for rapid screening through of patents by the R&D team
• Analyzing and manipulating related content such as US Assignments information, Sequence Listings, patent families, legal status.
• Grouping and filtering patent and journal data based on different criterion and assigning a rating that can represent its importance from technology, legal or commercial standpoint
• Categorizing patent data according to technology or product groups defined within the organization and maintaining updated patents sets (Techfolios) for each group. (Critical insights are usually revealed when you analyze patent data in context of technology and business categories that are relevant to your company and so categorization (or buketization) is important.)
• Managing patent images and patent PDFs effectively along with patent data

So, one of the key aspects that you should consider when considering an IP solution is your need for flexibility with the data within the solution. Our experience has been that most corporate IP professionals cannot have enough of “flexibility” when it comes to patent data and usually work on the leading edge of what one can do with the data. Managing the overall process of reporting, screening, and analyzing requires a lot of flexibility in manipulating, categorizing, grouping and reporting patent data and this can significantly burden corporate IP managers.

Transparency in analysis is also very important. “I could get thrown out of my management meeting if I don’t have the exact logic to back the analysis output” says one user. Its important for your analysis solution to provide transparency at each stage of the process. Most advanced users for Patent iNSIGHT Pro have questioned our charts and visualizations or even algorithmically calculated fields and we have helped them understand the full logic behind each. While there isn’t any exact statistic I could locate, based on what most researchers say it appears that very few people base decisions on patent maps that aren’t backed by a full understanding of the logic (and in many cases screening of patent content) behind the map.

A combination of a patent analysis platform such as Patent iNSIGHT Pro with a patent database can make a powerful and yet cost-effective solution to your needs for flexibility and transparency while accelerating activities that usually eat up most of your time. Without the right set of tools you can be spending weeks in achieving what would otherwise take a few days or lesser.