A New Approach to Find Relevant Insights in the Patent Landscape

Patent landscape analysis has been extensively used in the IP industry for many years to track the number of patent filings, competitors, and collaborations, among other things. But there’s a lot more to these landscapes than just numbers.

These days, executives are more concerned with what their competitors might be doing twenty-four hours a day to gain a competitive advantage in the metaphorical race. Surprisingly, the same patent data that is used to generate landscape reports can also be used to identify these unusual concentrations, on which your key competitors or emerging players may be basing their future.

The Majority of Patent Landscapes Lack Critical Details

The majority of patent analysts emphasize the traditional method of locating these concentrations by sharing a layout. The design depicts the technological development, which includes components and the most recent technologies developed in that field.

How can these representations assist you in determining what your competitors are attempting to do?

The majority of us would agree that current patent landscapes are incapable of providing correct answers in the first place, and possibly not even in the second. Multiple data dissections may provide you with a few hints that will assist you in moving your business forward.

Even so, you may not have a clear picture of the various critical areas that pose challenges in technological advancement and market needs and demands that drive the growth of a domain.

For example, if we discuss the 3D printing industry, specifically the use of metal powders in 3D printing (the use of metal powders is an important area of study because they play a crucial role in conferring good properties to the end product), any traditional landscape study would provide answers to these questions:

• How many patents have been applied for?
• Where are the most patent applications filed?
• Who are the most important players?
• Who is attempting to enter this zone?
• Where is the potential market located? And so forth.

Unfortunately, simply answering these questions will not propel your company forward. What can help you in your pursuit, however, are answers to critical questions like–

• What is impeding business development in the 3D Printing Industry when it comes to material selection?
• Where should we conduct high-return research?
• Which problems, if solved, will result in significant commercial benefits?

What Types of Insights make Patent Landscapes Fascinating?

Let’s use an example: if Stratasys filed 15 patents in 2014 and acquired another company (ABC) in the same domain, how much of an impact would this knowledge have on your business?

We expect the answer to be “not much.”

But what if someone shares—”Stratasys has developed a breakthrough solution (described in USXXX and others) that targets the oxidation problem to reduce the problem of agglomeration and sphericity in metal powders. Also, the effect of the merger could strengthen Stratasys’ business, as ABC’s portfolio will help tackle the problem of energy consumption in extraction and spheroidization”.

This is the point at which you realize that reducing your high energy consumption can save you thousands of dollars by tinkering with existing solutions or inventing a new one. This is the kind of information that will make the trip to the patent landscape worthwhile.

Thus, in order to have a significant impact on business development, it is critical to understand the problems that are stifling the industry and their developing solutions. This problem-solving approach to conducting a patent landscape can greatly improve decision-making capabilities.

XLSCOUT’s Techscaper has an exclusive Problem Analysis feature that not only provides technology intelligence, but also a comprehensive problem analysis. It has these following sub-categories:

1. Top Problems: Visualizing the major problem concepts of the domain. This helps to identify the problem concepts that are most frequently worked upon. The concepts are extracted from the latest 5000 US publications.
2. Problems Assignee: Identifying the top assignees working on the top problem concepts in the domain. 

Knowing where to file a patent based on industry and consumer needs is critical to avoiding a monetary loss caused by an undirected, worthless patent filing. Targeting the right pain point in a sector, on the other hand, can undoubtedly help to strengthen the revenue stream.

A 250-word Brief Guide on How to Perfect your Next Patent Landscapes

To address this major concern, you must redesign the taxonomy, which is the most important component of a patent landscape analysis.

You must understand that there is no requirement for traditional component or process-based taxonomy in every situation. What is needed is a business challenge taxonomy that focuses on the value chain and branches into various problems and their solutions. This type of taxonomy focuses on various parts of the value chain and the associated challenges. Furthermore, for each challenge, it must indicate the problems being solved as well as the type of solutions used.

Domains can be classified based on their importance in business. Taxonomy not only aids in providing actionable insights to clients, but it also establishes a link between business-level challenges and research-related problems. As a result, executives can use these insights to gain a clear direction for business-related decisions, competition, the future of the industry, and challenges. The R&D team, on the other hand, can use these insights to better understand the industry’s breakthroughs, alternate solutions/technologies, and the most pressing technological problems.

XLSCOUT Taxonomy Bot brings together Man and Machine

This works for you in a 4 step process :

1. Set a detailed custom taxonomy by combining corpus, machine suggestions, and your inputs.
2. Apply it on the “patents set” you want to categorize.
3. Categorization and graphical dashboard get ready in a few seconds.
4. Additional option to train the taxonomy with seed and anti-seed patents which have verified the accuracy of 95%.

Our Methodology

Techscaper, an innovative tool for explainable AI-based patent analytics has been created by XLSCOUT. Here, users can extract various insights by leveraging our different technology and competitive dashboards. Our patent landscape modules have the capability to categorize enormous portfolios into system-generated or user-generated categories as per the user’s requirements.

It is ever so easier now to compare and analyze technology trends over time. Techscaper’s interactive dashboard allows you to easily view the latest trends in technology. You can also access the dashboards to view and compare the latest trends in a specific technology area. With just a few clicks, it creates a patent landscape report tailored to your needs.