Why patent data is vital for engineers, manufacturing firms & industry as a whole.
All inventions start with an idea, but not every idea will result in an invention or product. How do you decide which ideas to take forward, which ideas are novel, or which ideas your competition are taking to the next step?
Patent data is often the only source for the key ideas that go on to shape and create industries and technology areas, as many processes and inventions described in patent literature are not disclosed elsewhere. Much has been written on the importance of monitoring the Intellectual Property (IP) space, protecting your own assets & property, and avoiding falling into the trap of infringing upon the IP of others. Even if potential infringement is detected before a product comes to market, it can cost a company hundreds of thousands in lost productivity when projects and products are scrapped due to competitor patents being found too late in the development progress.
Increasingly, organisations are using patent data for detecting threats and freedoms, to answer questions like:
Where can you find an expert to walk your team through new processes for your industry?
Is it cost-effective to develop, produce and market a new invention yourself, or would there be others within your space that you might sell or rent the rights to?
Which companies might benefit from an evolutionary or revolutionary improvement in an established production method?
IP data continues to be used by multiple roles across innovation-driven businesses to reduce R&D time and costs, informing researchers of avenues that are closed for investigation due to existing competitor IP, providing detailed technical information for comparison and contrast to in-house alternatives. Tools such as PatBase’s Analytics engine enable users tobetter (and more easily!) visualise and explore the technology landscape of their subject area. With over 70% of the world’s scientific knowledge disclosed within the sea of patent data, arming your R&D team with the tools and information required to accurately target your development budget can reduce waste by avoiding redundant work.
PatBase, co-developed by Minesoft and RWS, uses a family structure which collates all the information and publications for a single invention into one place, to reduce duplication of results and work. When viewing results, schematics, technical drawings and included charts or graphs are viewable directly from the record, with mosaic images drawn from all publications associated with a family accessible from a single page.
If you are a multi-national corporation, an SME or an academic institution, patent data can be used to inform business decisions, guide R&D strategy and identify talented recruitment pools for future projects. With data drawn from 105 countries or patenting authorities around the world including non-Latin data, PatBase provides access to one of the most comprehensive and high-quality collections of patent data in the industry. Whether you have a practical problem to solve, valuable IP you wish to protect, or a competitor you want to monitor, Minesoft’s web-based patent solutions have you covered.
