A robust patent portfolio is a major component in underpinning a firm’s current and future competitive position. As such, conducting a patent portfolio optimization exercise is critical to ensuring you have the most beneficial patents and reducing maintenance costs.
Our client, a manufacturer of measurement equipment for the life science industry, wanted to identify relevant and commercially-viable patents in their portfolio. With rich experience in the area of patent analytics and market intelligence, they appointed Netscribes as their partner to carry out this exercise.
Business Challenge
To optimize its portfolio with the most commercially-viable patents, our client required a complete analysis of the patent sets and related IPs for multi-core processors ranked based on parameters such as commercial viability and technological strength.
Solution
To assess the economic value of the selected patents, Netscribes implemented a technology ranking system that scores each patent based on the following parameters:
- Patent enforceability: We evaluated the geographic spread, observability, and ease of investigating each patent.
- Market impact: This step threw light on the present and future commercial use of each patent and how they compared with existing products in the market.
- Claim construction: We investigated the lack of prior art, scope of claims, and availability of alternatives and supported the evaluation with appropriate comments.
- Patent citation analysis: We analyzed both forward and backward citations, including the number and share of citations by the client as well as other entities
Results Delivered
We delivered a list of patents ranked in the order of their commercial value. Based each patent’s score, we highlighted the most promising patents from the portfolio that could be licensed out.
Benefits
With the help of Netscribes’ technology ranking exercise, the client was able to shortlist and prioritize only the most important patents for commercialization. The ranking metrics used in the study filtered out commercially viable patents from an otherwise inactive portfolio of low ranked patents. Our client was, thus, able to reduce the burden of maintaining a large portfolio of patents.
