In "Why the US Patent Office is a National Problem" Fast Company published an excerpt from the recently published book “Great Again” on June 9, 2010.
This Fast Company Leadership briefing focuses upon the importance of a well-functioning patent office and patent systems for entrepreneurs, technology companies (and their investors) and economic development. "It is the intellectual property that [provides] the basis for investors to place their resources at risk," wrote Mario Cardullo, counselor for technology and entrepreneurship within the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce.”
The article further discusses the difference between merely having IP and developing well-positioned, strong, high-quality IP rights, including references to IPVision’s analytics into the correlation between patent quality and patent positions and venture capital success.
With the U.S. patent office seeking to reduce patent pendency (the time it takes for a patent to issue), concern remains on the quality of patents received by companies. Two measures dominate this analysis, the breadth of a claim (IE, how “much” rights are provided to the patent holder) and the structural quality of a claim. Historically, these measures required expert analysis and could only be received on a targeted basis. IPVision worked with Fortune 100 patent holders and legal experts to create an expert system that provides these insights at a fraction of the time and cost of manual review – thus, enabling patent counsel and technical experts with data-driven access to these critical insights.
In bench-mark studies, IPVision has demonstrated across multiple large patent portfolios that often less than 5% of patent claims provide “A1” results – namely, those patent claims that are both broad and structurally well-written per case law. IPVision’s Joe Hadzima, who counsels senior corporate leaders, draws upon the analogy of patents as building blocks. “You can have a large pile of blocks (the historical “large patent portfolio / war-chest”) or a castle/fortress constructed from strategic assets (a well-developed, strategically-aligned patent portfolio).”
IPVision routinely assists clients incorporate patent claims analytics (as an indicator of patent quality) into strategy, competitive intelligence and risk-management processes.
Download a complimentary (summary) patent metrics report: patent quality assessment for Microsoft Corporation patents from 2000-2009 for one example of how IPVision helps overcome the data overload problem faced by historical expert-based and more-recent outsourced-based labor-driven approaches.
