Breaking the Information BarrierMonday 01, June 2009 by Tyron Stading |
There is a continuous question in analysis: Do you have enough of the right information to make a smart decision? Without the right information, there can be blind spots, gaps, or incomplete answers. Too often people have access to the right information, but do not incorporate it because it is too difficult to consolidate and bring it all together. It is largely a matter of simplicity — how easy is it to get the right information? Think of your own job; you know your company has knowledge about licensing deals, litigation, etc, but how often do you include it for competitive intelligence?
There is a significant barrier today in which a vast amount of internal knowledge about a subject exists, but it is nearly impossible to incorporate that with external analytics.
It’s almost universally the case, for example, that research teams and companies develop their own taxonomies of patents, and they usually view these patents in the context of the market. For instance, a consumer packaged goods company might develop a patent taxonomy such as the following: an oral hygiene patents group containing a toothpaste patents group, which in turn contains a group of tooth-whitening patents. (e.g. Oral Hygiene/Toothpaste/Tooth-Whitening).
This taxonomy is often constructed by internal annotations that have no meaning to public sources (such as the patent office), which has its own taxonomy of patent classifications. The researcher must cope with two views of the same set of IP data. Compound that with other annotations such as licensing deals on patents, infringement threats and most prolific inventors, and you have a lot of internal data to manage — in addition to externally available information.
We hear from customers a lot that they want a Single View of their research. While they have created internal research and purchased public research, they rarely have the time or the skills needed to merge the two views together. This causes frustration among researchers because they HAVE the information but no way to tell a unified story.
Furthermore, they have multiple groups generating new and fresh research, but each is often on a different system each of which might not communicate with each other. The information, then, often goes unused. If they only had a "Single View" they could seamlessly do research and share it between groups. This would improve the quality of analysis, increase productivity, improve speed, etc. Until now, there have been huge challenges in making the all data work together.
Innography addresses this problem in our latest release, Innography Spring ’09, with an extension of our collaborative feature, Projects. As you accumulate information you can immediately populate it in a Project. Any private data, such as market segment revenues for a specific company or internal assignments and workflows can be can now be captured and put into a Project using the Import feature. This data can then be overlaid with externally available data such as competitive patent portfolio data and citation analysis. You can then organize all of that combined information in any way that makes sense to your organization. Innography can correlate on Patents, Companies, Litigation, and other nouns.
The system also enables you to annotate all of the data in a project. For example, if someone is assigned to in-license a particular patent that was discovered you can make a note of that fact along with the progress of that effort.
Your internal patent taxonomies are also created quite naturally through the use of labels. These labels can be used to set up hierarchical structures in your project very much like hierarchical file structures.
You can also share all of this information with your team immediately. Any user can be given access to a project by the project owner, in which case that user can view all the project data as it is added. Users can then update the project as they uncover new data and make progress within their workflows.
The results can also be shared by e-mail with other team members and even people such as clients and partners who are not users of the system. Users of the system can receive a URL to the visualization or other exposed data, and the graphic representation of the data can also be sent to an external recipient as an attachment.
All of this new capability produces a multiplicative effect on projects. Users are more apt to use the system and, as a natural consequence, will make the data available to other users, simply by saving it in a project as a matter of course. As other users come into possession of the results they will be more inclined to move their part of the project forward and share their findings with the team as well.
Innography also has the capability to store project data behind your firewall. As you add data within an Innography project, Innography can store all project data behind your firewall seamlessly. Users with very sensitive project data can use this new feature to add another layer of security if needed.
All of this new capability can accelerate the work performed by research teams and individuals. Rather than a negative feedback loop, a positive feedback loop tends to develop, which causes the project to gather momentum.
As I mentioned in my last blog, I don’t like talking about the competition, but it’s my opinion that elsewhere in the industry these sorts of collaborative tools are sadly lacking. This is just the kind of thing we all should be offering to truly service the market in the way we should.
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The Power of the UISaturday 11, April 2009 by Tyron Stading |
The Power of the UI
I frankly don’t like mentioning our competition for lots of reasons — but I’m making an exception in this blog. I’m not going to mention them by name, but what I will say is that they don’t seem to understand the importance of the User Interface (UI).
Apple has always understood how important the UI is — because they’ve always focused on the “U” in UI: the User. I credit their success today for that very reason. From its inception, Apple has concerned itself with the user experience, beginning with the original Apple computer and most recently with the iPhone. They created things that met a market demand and made it easy for customers to use them.
It was, in fact, this philosophy that brought the PC to a whole new class of people who really didn’t care about computers and quite frankly thought they had no use for them. Today, this same class of people probably couldn’t imagine life without their Mac or their iPod.
That philosophy of embracing the user experience has been paramount to me since I set out to build a better mouse trap. As an inventor at IBM, I saw individuals struggle at the company as they tried to cope with large patent pools and the peripheral issues such as licensing and litigation that accompany them. In my mind, the key to successfully managing those things is how the data is acquired, represented and visualized by the users tasked with that purpose.
A renowned information visualization expert, Dr. Edward Tufte, once said “I think it is important for software to avoid imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.” This notion is exactly what I’ve tried to build into our product from the ground up — a way to make the tool work for the user rather than expecting the user to work for the tool.
Unfortunately for the market, our competition has not embraced this philosophy as readily. As a matter of fact, they are still using UI technology from the ‘90s. And while that might have been fine 15 years ago, it suggests that they aren’t really focused on ensuring a positive customer experience. To me, the user experience is really our primary mission.
Here are the essential problems that I see with the UIs for most products on the market today — problems we’ve tried very hard to avoid.
First, they force complex Boolean queries. It’s not that they don’t work; it’s that they make you work too hard. The primary focus for users of these tools is constructing complex Boolean search strings, which Innography supports — but which you aren’t forced to use. For example, drilling into a specific company should be a single click instead of a complex series of company names. Conducting research in that way is challenging and it’s also distracting. The user’s focus becomes the search preparation rather than analyzing and using the results.
Another problem is the lack of collaborative tools. Sharing the information becomes a completely separate process rather than an integrated part of the research. Customers need a process in which they have the capability to share data as they accumulate it in real time. They need a common repository so that they can work with other team members efficiently — because efficiency often breeds effectiveness.
The speed of these systems is also quite slow because of the way they’re designed. The algorithms they use are simply inefficient and don’t take advantage of computing advances in the last decade (e.g. map-reduce). It’s also worth noting that a slow system isn’t just inconvenient — it’s one more distraction.
People today have constant distractions and they need the system to be as fast as they think so they can maintain their train of thought. Waiting tens of seconds, minutes, or even hours for an answer is not an option.
To prioritize the User Interface, Innography has invested heavily in the user experience for our next release. We’ve hired incredible talent from the music industry and brought in consultants from large consumer-oriented websites. The result is a huge improvement in speed, usability, workflow productivity and user experience. While our current product is one of the easier UIs on the market, the next release breaks new ground on ease of use and user experience.
This passion for the user experience has led me to the development of what I like to call the Innography Manifesto, which comprises three basic tenets:
1) Usability is a paramount feature of the system — not an afterthought.
Just because a system has a powerful analytics and correlation engine doesn’t mean you can afford to compromise the UI or treat it as a secondary element. All that power in the engine is useless if you can’t access it easily and in context of your daily workflow.
2) Build the system around the user; don’t expect the user to accommodate what you build.
Many systems developed by our competitors were developed with an enterprise software mentality. Such systems tend to be unwieldy, hard to use and often contain a counterintuitive UI. We’ve taken an approach that is more like consumer-oriented products in the sense that we strive to keep the customer in mind from the beginning and continue to do so with every improvement.
3) Speed and collaboration are vital.
Our competitors have consistently made system speed a low priority. Our next release is being developed and user-tested with this tenet positioned as a very high priority. We also consider the ability to share and disseminate information as one of the metrics of speed. If you can’t dynamically share information with people who need it, you aren’t leveraging the full value of your research.
We’ll be announcing the new release soon. When it is available I highly recommend you check it out so you can see the difference a user focus makes in an IP business analytics tool.
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Maximize Value; Minimize Cost. Your IP and You.Saturday 28, February 2009 by Tyron Stading |
My last few blogs have focused on — or at least acknowledged — the sputtering economy. And while that reality is an important aspect of any business, it’s equally important to realize that a lot of our best businesses practices are applicable regardless of the state of the economy. The suggestions I’ve previously offered regarding IP and how to manage it make sense in both good times and bad.
That’s because the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your IP is staggering. It’s estimated that the average cost over the course of the 20-year life span of a single patent is about $100,000.00 — or roughly $5,000 per year in maintenance fees. And that doesn’t begin to cover the initial investment, which on average is about $150,000.00 to develop a single patentable invention. That’s due in part because the U.S. patent office currently rejects about 65% of all patent applications.
Then there’s the cost of litigation, which is estimated at approximately $4.5 million dollars in attorney’s fees as well as the costs associated with financial compliance regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley. Also, if licensing is part of your business model (as it should be), there’s the cost just to manage your licensing pipeline. Add it all up and you’re talking about a huge investment.Given the TCO of individual patents, companies should strive to get a healthy Return on their Investment (ROI). One of the most effective things you can do to maximize your ROI is to embrace the concept of Open Innovation networks.
Open Innovation helps you create new revenue streams while simultaneously reducing your required R&D investment. Companies like Proctor & Gamble did exactly that and experienced a great deal of success as a result. According to Larry Huston, a senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation, Procter & Gamble extended its innovation process, to comprise 1.5 million people outside the company.
In his article, Innovation Networks: Looking for Ideas Outside the Company, Huston writes “Innovation networks are people, institutions and companies that are outside the firm …. They are intellectual assets that companies can link up with to solve problems and find ideas, while beginning to think about those assets as an extended part of their organization — and therefore quickly create top-line growth and bring new things to the marketplace.”
If you choose to build everything in-house, you ensure your inability to be as agile and creative as your competitors. The sheer number of innovators outside your corporate walls makes it impossible for you to effectively compete with everyone. While R&D is a key function, some companies are now requiring a percentage of their product lines and technologies to be externally acquired. R&D costs can be significant compared to the benefits of licensing from the outside when considering time to market and lost opportunities.
Externally sourcing innovation could save you a lot of money and resources, while simultaneously providing the added benefit of accelerating your time to market.
Another way to improve your ROI is to vigilantly ensure your IP investment continues to make sense. Having a blanket business policy of always maintaining everything in your IP portfolios can significantly, and often needlessly, increase costs for your business. Today’s market requires a process to understand the value of the patent — both to you and to potential licensees — so that your business strategy drives renewal decisions based on evolving market conditions.
Using objective metrics to determine whether to continue investing in maintenance fees will have a positive impact on your bottom line. If you find that, by judiciously analyzing your portfolios, you can eliminate a portion of your IP because it’s no longer relevant to your business, you also eliminate a lot more than maintenance fees. You cut the other associated costs I mentioned as well.
You can also consider the possibility of out licensing such patents so that you can continue to collect revenue while offloading the costs to others who do find the patent valuable. It’s a little like renting your house to a tenant rather than selling it to a buyer. You keep the property while letting someone else pay the mortgage and taxes as well as collecting a nice premium from the renter.
It’s also important not to overlook the patent jurisdictions represented in your portfolios. Initially, it may have made sense to file a patent in a particular jurisdiction. That doesn’t mean it makes sense to keep renewing it in that jurisdiction for the entire life of the patent.
The point is that while IP portfolios are extremely valuable, they are also very costly to create and maintain. Like any other business asset, you need to recognize those costs and do all you can to get the greatest ROI from them. You also need to understand when it’s time to let them go because they no longer have the value to you that they once did.
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The Rise of the Infringement LetterMonday 09, February 2009 by Tyron Stading |
When The Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, better known as the first bailout bill, was proposed, the price tag ($700 billion) seemed staggering. It also confirmed what most of us knew and (as I mentioned in my last post) what the NBER finally admitted: a recession wasn’t looming; it’s already here.
I don’t really want to focus too much on the negative sentiment about the economy. However, I do think it’s important to take stock of some pertinent facts that we simply can’t afford to overlook in the current economic climate. A primary fact that most companies are going to have to deal with is the rise of the infringement letter.
In a previous post, for example, I charted documented recessions that demonstrate a 30% rise in litigation over the subsequent three years following the start of a recession. This occurs primarily because companies tend to become desperate when traditional revenue channels begin to dry up during challenging economic times. Many of these companies then seek infringement claims as an additional source of revenue.
According to CIO Magazine “Between 2007 and 2008, 29 percent of billion-dollar firms were served with more than 50 new lawsuits. Forty-three percent of those in the same bracket anticipate that in the coming year, there will be a rise in litigation.” Furthermore, a recent survey produced by The International Law Firm of Fulbright and Jaworski suggests an anticipated rise in infringement claims as well.
Their survey, the Fifth Annual Litigation Trends Survey reported that 83% of surveyed companies expect a rise in infringement claims and 90% expected their companies to increase their own infringement claims. The survey also indicated that the most litigious industries, technology/communications, retail/wholesale and manufacturing, had definite expectations regarding a rise in infringement claims.
As a case in point, a large printer maker, who in previous years received about one infringement letter each year, now receives approximately 100 infringement letters per year. To make matters worse, all these statistics are really just the tip of the iceberg. 86% of all litigation ends in either an out of court settlement or without a documented resolution.
Many companies who threaten to file infringement often use a shotgun approach, sending out dozens of infringement letters hoping that most of the recipients will negotiate an out of court settlement. As it turns out, this actually works in your favor.
There’s an old adage that says when a bear is chasing you, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the guy running next to you. What that means in the case of infringement claims is that you don’t necessarily have to prove the claim is invalid or even negotiate with the claimant. All you have to do is make it a lot more work for the claimant to go after you than the other companies who were also sent infringement letters. The key is preparation.
First, you should perform your due diligence to know who is most likely to target you for an infringement claim. This will enable you to gather the intelligence necessary to deflect the claim.
The next step is to investigate the patent held by the companies you uncover to understand how the patent might be asserted against you. It’s important, in this step, to examine independent vs. dependent claims, the assignment chain and additional litigation in which the patent has been involved.
You’ll then want to try to invalidate the patents you’ve been researching, so that you can prepare a response to that effect ahead of time. You should also research the holders of these patents to better understand potential aggressors. As you develop your response strategy, it’s helpful to understand the company’s financial status, litigation history and other entity names the company might be using.
You should also investigate possible counter-assertion opportunities to serve as another weapon in your arsenal. Finally, you should identify potential experts that can assist you in the event that litigation becomes necessary and to advise you on your litigation strategy.
Armed with this information, you can develop an infringement claim response strategy, which should include a response letter, enabling an immediate response. We’ve outlined all these steps and a few others in an instructive brief you can download here.
By following these steps you can make your company look very unattractive to a potential claimant because the other infringement targets will seem much more vulnerable than you are.
Sources:
CIO Magazine
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Breaking the Information Barrier
Maximize Value; Minimize Cost. Your IP and You.
The Rise of the Infringement Letter
Open Innovation – Succeeding in an Economic Downturn
Will a Recession Impact the Patent Industry?
Correlating Patents with Litigation Data to Determine Legal Risk
Why the User Interface will Drive Innovation in Patent Research
Media Relations
Karoline McLaughlin
1.512.306.8688 x153
kmclaughlin@innography.com