Companies need to give some thought to other companies’ patents. An obvious reason is that understanding each competitor’s patent rights helps to avoid committing patent infringement, but the benefits of diving into competitor patent portfolios go even further. Creating patent benchmarking reports comparing patent data and USPTO patent statistics belonging to competitors can help companies benchmark their own patent prosecution performance and find areas for improvement.
Each patent application submitted to the USPTO is categorized and classified based on the type of technology claimed within it. The same technology classifications used by the USPTO can help patent professionals focus their research to effectively compare the patent performances of several companies in the same commercial space. By evaluating company patent data, statistics, and performance metrics for patent applications assigned to a specific technology center, LexisNexis PatentAdvisor® users can evaluate how much their rivals are innovating in a specific technological area and how much ease or difficulty they have had in obtaining patent protection for their inventions.
Prosecution Business Development and Analysis performance benchmarking reports generated through the PatentAdvisor™ patent analytics platform allow companies to quickly compare USPTO prosecution performances and patent portfolios for several companies at once. Users can generate a report by first searching for a single company of interest (e.g., the user’s company or competitor), and then selecting a date range and one or more USPTO Technology Centers (to filter for patents and patent applications they want to include in their competitive analysis). They will then be presented with a list of additional companies with patent filings in the same Technology Center and can select companies from that list for comparison. PatentAdvisor will generate a detailed report with a competitive analysis that helps users both visualize and understand the information provided.
Patent benchmarking reports provide users with a wide variety of insights fueled by USPTO patent data, including visual representations that help users understand and retain the information provided. Users can see and compare the composition of several company patent portfolios simultaneously, including how many patents, pending patent applications, and abandoned applications are included in each competitors’ U.S. patent portfolio.
Benefits of patent benchmarking reports include the graphs and charts in each report, helping users understand how effective and efficient companies have been in prosecuting their patent applications. Many common indicators of patent performance are clearly expressed in each report, such as how long it takes each identified company to obtain a patent, how many office actions they typically receive before the conclusion of prosecution, and how frequently they abandon their pending patent applications. Even proprietary performance metrics based on advanced algorithms are included in each report, including efficiency scores that provide a measure of how well companies have performed against the USPTO after the difficulty levels of their assigned patent examiners are taken into account.
Evaluating the performances of others provides us with both competitive intelligence and a better understanding of our own performances. Benefits of patent benchmarking reports generated through PatentAdvisor include providing users with the information they need to better understand the competition and to evaluate the quality of their own efforts in seeking patent protection.
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