For competitive intelligence, you can gather incredible amounts of information from patents that provide insights into what is happening within a particular industry, with your competitors’ innovation efforts, and with companies that are making innovation discoveries in specific areas of interest.
For supply market intelligence, especially for analysis in highly innovative and tech-forward markets, incorporating patent data can allow for a more complete picture of a landscape, which is particularly important for supplier discovery and intelligence efforts.
Anyone who has ever searched for patent data knows how challenging it can be. An announcement made by USPTO earlier this month that introduces a tool allowing for more precise and flexible searching of patent data is a step forward in making this type of information more accessible. The United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) new Patent Public Search tool is a free, cloud-based platform that combines the capabilities of four existing search tools scheduled to be retired in September 2022: Public-Examiner’s Automated Search Tool (PubEAST), Public-Web-based Examiner’s Search Tool (PubWEST), Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT), and Patent Application Full-Text and Image Database (AppFT). In the past, users could only access PubEAST and PubWEST in-house at certain USPTO and patent resource center facilities. Now, with the new tool, anyone can search remotely (with internet access) with the added bonus of having available more sophisticated search, results management, and workflow capabilities that are usually offered by similar commercial databases. Features and benefits include:
- Layouts: multiple layouts with multiple tools to provide more data at once
- Highlighting: multi-color highlighting that can be viewed across multiple gadgets and turned on or off
- Tagging: ability to tag documents into multiple groups that can be renamed and color coordinated
- Notes: ability to add notes to an image with options to include tags, relevant claims, and highlights
- Quality: robust full-text searching of U.S. patents and published applications
Handy quick reference guides are available to help you learn all the features of the tool including adding notes to images, workspace layouts, managing highlights, search overview, search results, and tagged documents.
In similar news, Elsevier’s subscription-based chemistry database, Reaxys, now has available patent provenance capabilities to provide ownership information and has extended its collaboration with LexisNexis PatentSight, now exceeding 30 million discoverable patents. “The Reaxys updates will enhance competitive intelligence by distinguishing ‘current patent assignee’ and ‘original patent assignee’ to track ownership over time, demonstrating which companies are most prominent in a particular field. Easy-to-use search filters will allow users to sort between inventors and current patent holders.” LexisNexis and Elsevier are subsidiaries of RELX.
Photo by jplenio, via Pixabay.
