Simplify Your Search
by Roji John on September 02, 2008
Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. --Albert Einstein
One of the things I’m constantly asked about is the specifics of our search capability. I’ll often run down the list, from the common to the more obscure. Overall, the response to our breadth of options has been very positive.
I’ve even gotten involved with porting some of the queries from different engines to ours. This can be a dizzying experience. The level of complexity in some of these queries is amazing.
For the more involved case (and even for the simple one) it’s good to take a step back and focus on the goal of the project. Often the questions are much more mundane than the queries. What’s happened is that the user has been forced over time to modify the query to get a relevant data set. This caused a morphing of what was once probably something very simple and clear. Some users are so used to this that they can write (and even think) in this complex boolean logic.
The answer is usually not in directly porting the boolean logic to our system. By understanding the goal, the options available with Innography can often rescue us from this unnecessary complexity.
Being in the right vicinity is the most important part of the answer. I lightly touched on the advantages of the patent classification system in my last blog post. The classification system is one of the vicinities. By limiting your search space to relevant technologies and applications, your query can be simplified to more easily capture the relevant data.
There are other vicinities. A list of competitors, a date range, or even inventors can all be vicinities. Even business information such as revenues or the amount of litigation might give you a vicinity. It all depends on the final goal.
The filters available on the left side of any result set are how you can get to the right vicinity. I’ve been able to assist our users in transforming complicated, hierarchical boolean logic down to just a few plain keywords with a few filters. When that happens, even I can understand what’s being searched.
The added advantage to simplified search is that our users are able to easily modify it to get immediate insights. This changes the game. It makes the search process about insights rather than data retrieval. Pushing the insights into the search process gives our users the power to make decisions during the research rather than as a result of it. It might take a little while to get used to this process, but once implemented our users find it invaluable.
Dumpster Diving and Other IP Analysis Patterns
by Ryan Rozich on August 18, 2008
Software design patterns are generally reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software development. It is usually not a direct code snippet or solution, but rather a high level description of how to solve a problem that can be applied to many different solutions. One of the nicest things about software design patterns is that each pattern is named in a way that lets software designers share ideas using a common vocabulary. Software designers and programmers can discuss their use of a ‘decorator’ pattern or an ‘adapter’ pattern without having to dig in to the code level.
So what does any of this have to do with IP analytics? I have recently seen some presentations about named IP strategy patterns. At the LES spring meeting this year for instance there was a presentation on putting together an IP ‘playbook.’ They provided named ‘plays’ such as the ‘pied piper’ strategy for publishing your invention in trade journals after you file a patent application.
At Innography, we have seen many reusable ‘patterns’ of slicing through data for valuable insights. For instance, here is an IP analysis pattern that we have been referring to as ‘Dumpster Diving.’ If you were looking to acquire patents on the cheap you might examine recently abandoned (expired due to failure to pay maintenance) patents. You may catch a discarded patent in a resurrection window where the owner could bring the patent back to active status and reassign it to you. Since we know that it was not valued enough by them to pay annuities on the patent, you might be able to purchase that patent for pennies on the dollar of what it would cost you to acquire it from someone with a stronger negotiating position. This is an example of a re-usable ‘pattern’ for IP analysis.
As IP analysis tools become more mature and prevalent, I expect that we should be hearing more about these analysis patterns and best practices for getting useful business insight out of IP data.
The Real Deal Behind Yahoo and Microsoft: Patents as Financial Assets
by Tyron Stading on August 09, 2008
Last week there was a rumor that Microsoft’s real intention behind acquiring Yahoo is around valuable IP. This article talked about how everyone was scrambling to find out which patent Yahoo held that was so critical to Microsoft. This was interesting on two levels: 1) what IP asset is so valuable to warrant billions of dollars to purchase Yahoo, and 2) what would Microsoft do with that asset if they acquired it?
While I admit this is the first I had heard of the rumors, I can’t say that I’m surprised. Microsoft has been heavily attacked on multiple IP fronts with several hundred of millions to billions of dollars judgments against them. Depending on where they are going in the future, they know the price of not innovating and what it costs to get it wrong.
I think the true take away from the story is that patents are a huge financial asset and are now a large focus of acquisitions. However, the lack of solutions to find, assess and financially analyze patents is the big pain. All of Silicon Valley is scrambling to understand what is so valuable, but they will all fail without some synthesis of business, legal and IP/technical information. For tax accounting, risk analysis, forecasting and financial metrics, patents have been neglected in how companies manage them like true financial assets.
As more stories like Microsoft surface, I predict the evolution of standard industry financial practices for patents. The only way to do so will be to interconnect with financial accounting systems, ERP systems, HR systems, etc to get a completely seamless picture of patents as financial assets. Imagine being able to attribute patents to product revenue, market growth, HR incentives, product planning, SOX compliance reports and tax returns. All other financial assets have been incorporated into this model, and I predict this will become standard operating procedure within the next 5-10 years.
As Microsoft knows better than anyone, the value of Yahoo is not just in operations, but in future markets and protection against new threats. I’m passionate about this future and believe we are at the Early Majority phase where patents will become the first assets to be valued for daily operations.
The Prior Art Paradox
by Doug Miller on July 30, 2008
Admittedly I am not an IP attorney, or for that matter even a patent or IP expert. Having been introduced to the market only a year and half ago, a lot of the concepts and practices are new to me. I have to admit that I find it to be a very fascinating field. One of the things that has really jumped out to me while talking to our customers and prospects is the divide—make that chasm—that exists in corporate attitude and policy regarding whether to allow inventors, engineers, and researchers to view prior art around inventions and projects they are working on. This is one of those issues that it seems there is are only two colors black and white—no shades of grey.
On the one hand, many companies do not want researchers to search for or view any prior art as part of their standard research process. The thinking here, driven it seems by corporate legal, is that by not allowing the inventors to search for or view related art that the company is maintaining “plausible deniability” in the event of any potential future infringement actions. And in fact, current patent legislation fully defines and supports this practice, and to a large extent encourages patent filers to perform minimal prior art searching on their own. I personally think this is one of the flaws in the current patent system and the reason that in many cases prior art is missed by examiners, and is a great argument for the currently being tested patent peer review and the move toward patent legislation reform. (NB: This is my personal opinion and does not represent the views of Innography). This approach represents the traditional view of intellectual property as a defensive only mechanism, still held by a large number of companies.
On the other hand, is the approach that seems to be widely adopted by companies that are embracing innovative strategies and open innovation. Companies in this camp encourage researchers and engineers to fully understand the IP landscape. By exposing them to prior art and related IP from their field as well as other fields and industries, they are encouraging truly innovative and unique approaches to their projects. By seeing what has already been done in the area of their invention, they can invent around existing art to develop truly novel technologies. This approach often identifies opportunities for collaboration through licensing or partnering that can help these innovation-driven companies introduce new products to market faster. In these companies, an innovation approach has replaced the traditional courtroom approach and is leading to truly unique ideas being developed faster than ever before.
My own observation here is that I find the dichotomy to be striking, in fact more so than in any market I’ve ever been associated with. Perhaps it is a very good indicator of a shift in market behavior and attitudes and represents a new way of thinking about intellectual property as the intangible, leveragable asset that it is. Neither approach is right or wrong, but it is definitely an issue that finds companies polarized.
For our purposes as a company, it doesn’t really matter which camp our customers fall in since our product can support/accommodate either approach and we already have customers firmly entrenched in each camp. For my way of thinking the open approach makes more sense—but hey that’s just me!
