For IP professionals working in a patent law firm, a R&D driven company, research facility or even in a service provider, managing patent research process is plagued with inefficiencies. With consumers of research information asking for faster turnaround times albeit with higher accuracies every professional must look into his/her research workflow and locate inefficiencies that are delaying the overall analysis process.
Based on our experience of working with researchers across a diverse set of organizations, we have split the overall activities performed by researchers into various core activities.
| Core Activities | Tools needed to speed up execution |
| Devising the search strategy | Database to allow quick checking and refining of the search as the search made more precise. |
| Consolidating multiple searches into a common portfolio | |
| Claims Analysis, Review and Rating, Narrowing down | Generating Claims comparison charts |
| Claims Tree generation | |
| Similarity search and tools to conduct advanced search (proximity/left-truncation etc) on claims | |
| Tagging or scoring tools to mark important records as you come across them | |
| Independent Claims exporting | |
| Different patent text export formats including export of face pages for rapid review and scanning in a team environment | |
| Categorizing and bucketing records | Auto-Categorization to discover unique concepts and clusters present in the set |
| Tools to easily and efficiently create buckets and bucketise patents as you review them | |
| Advanced search tools to dig through the data efficiently | |
| Generating charts, comparisons and dashboards that capture the insight you want to give | Grouping and efficient slice-dice tools to accelerate the analysis process |
| Efficient matrix generators that allows you to compare 2, 3 or more properties at a time | |
| Automated charting tools to convert filtered data quickly into a chart | |
| Ready to use dashboards that allow you to gain insights and generate common analysis charts quickly |
An IP research and analysis solution can provide IP professionals, tools to leverage at each stage of core activity execution so that they can focus on core activities without getting slowed down by procedures.
Working with IP data is characterized by working with a large input data sources and a large number of output data sources. To carry out what should be a well-researched analysis in a technology space would involve a patent database, several patent documents, patent text files, spreadsheets, working files, charts and reports. A lot of this becomes overwhelming when working only with spreadsheets. For example, the outputs alone would involve working with several spreadsheets let alone the spreadsheets which actually hold the source information and the working / analysis. There are just too many files and data sheets to work with in different places and that’s often what makes the process difficult.
In addition to provision different analytic tools, an efficient analytics platform can also consolidate and organize these multiple files and data sheets into a single location so as to simplify management of the process.
Consolidation has been a key ingredient of the technology architecture of the Patent iNSIGHT Pro that also functions as an IP knowledge management software. From bringing together various patent databases and data sources to creating single view reporting dashboards for easy reviewing of outputs having all your data within reach from a single system alone improves the speed at which you can access IP intelligence. It eliminates the need to navigate through several instances of Excel spreadsheets, various tabs with different data sources and multiple files across the desktop and allows you to manage everything through one interface. As a step torwards consolidating different analytics into a single view, the 360° series of reports one of the newer features on Patent iNSIGHT Pro for example, consolidates a number of report outputs into a single page dashboard view which is quicker and simpler to present and review as compared to a dozen output spreadsheet printouts which can take longer to comprehend.
If you find your IP research and associated information management process overwhelming with multiple files and data sheets across too many locations …consolidate! You will find things can become a lot quicker and far simpler.