Patents & Applications

The Patent Intelligence add-on module leverages the IHS Patent Collection of 60 million patents and applications, and also provides a collection of analytical tools that can extract valuable intelligence from patent bibliographic data. The application leverages semantic analysis and metadata from the patents to assist users in spotting influential trends, companies and inventors.

Search Patents – The Patent Search tool allows a user to search for a specific patent, based on a variety of criteria (patent number, title, assignee, abstract, etc.). This is useful, for example, when a user knows the document required or would like to identify patents assigned to a given company or a particular inventor.

Semantically generated summaries of patents are provided in any of the supported languages (currently, English, French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese), regardless of the language of the original document. This is useful for determining quickly and easily whether a given patent is applicable to a user's research and therefore requires further investigation. Of course, the full-text patent itself can also be viewed in the original language, either in a text-based HTML document or as a PDF document.

Analyze Technology – The Technology Analysis tool maps semantically relevant discussions of a technology against one or more patent content sources. Analysis results include:

• Patent activity for up to 5 assignees (or groups)
• Bibliographic data
• Assignee List
• Blended inventor list
• Patent class distribution
• Top 5 assignees, inventors and patent classes

The tool presents users with a view of patent activity related to a particular technology over time, allowing them to understand, for example, where the technology is in its lifecycle. That information could be useful in evaluating whether a company should make investments in research into a technology or direct investment elsewhere. Leading inventors can also be identified, making it possible to ascertain key researchers around a given technology area.

Analyze Companies – The Company Analysis tool generates a specific innovation profile for one assignee or a group of assignees. The analysis includes:

• Patent Activity Chart
• Inventor Lists
• Bibliographic data
• Class distribution

The resulting chart and listing data can help identify:

• Core Technologies
• Key Inventors
• Trends within specific technologies
• Citation anomalies

Users can view a company's overall patent activities or activities related to specific technologies or compare the activities of multiple companies to understand competitive trends relative to a particular technology over time. This could be useful for understanding the extent to which different companies are investing in research related to a technology.

Analyze Patent References – The Patent References Analysis tool lets a user view citations of a patent by other patents (as well as by/from patent applications), in addition to mapping out the assignees/companies attached to forward and backward references. Backward references provide a map to the "pedigree" of a patent – the history of the technologies or innovations incorporated into the patent. Forward citations are often very useful in determining potential innovation barriers, competitors, or licensing opportunities. "Young" patent documents with relatively high forward citation counts are particularly useful to discover and investigate for technology trends, owners and valuation.