Objectively Evaluate Innovation

The Patent Asset Index represents a measure of the innovative strength of an enterprise or an entire technology field. It is calculated at the level of a patent portfolio as the sum of the Competitive Impact scores of the individual patent families contained in this portfolio.

Depending on the question to be addressed, the Patent Asset Index can be calculated for a company as a whole, or just for patents belonging to specific business areas or technology fields. In this case, it shows the strength of the company in those particular domains only.

The methodology is transparent and widely published. In addition, it is scientifically validated and approved in the corporate world. Our indicators and underlying data are broadly accepted and applied in the industry by many blue-chip companies across all sectors. They are even used in Investor Communication by Fortune & DAX and other companies (Dow, BASF, Daimler, Evonik, and others).

The Patent Asset Index has been unchanged since its inception in 2008, standing for validity and stability of the approach.

The patent databases INPADOC and DOCDB provided by the European Patent Office (EPO) are the central patent data sources for the PatentSight+ database. Furthermore, we add legal status information from national offices (US and JP) to the data stream as well as subsidiary information from corporate structure databases. In addition, all patent offices around the world provide their patent data with the EPO, so we cover all relevant patent data worldwide. The PatentSight+ database currently covers patent data from more than 80 patent authorities.  

Since PatentSight+ is part of LexisNexis^®, our database also contains IP DataDirect (IPDD). IPDD from LexisNexis provides worldwide patent information in bulk. The entire IPDD content with improved bibliographic and legal status information will be integrated into the PatentSight+ database by the end of 2021.

PatentSight+ uses the simple family concept of the European Patent Office (EPO) also known as the S-Fam or Espacenet family. This family concept requires that all family members are based on an identical set of priority documents. This ensures that all the family members cover the same invention. This is also an advantage over the INPADOC family: patent documents in an INPADOC family can have only partially overlapping priorities, thus putting documents together in a chain-like manner that in the end have only little in common. These families might become so broad in the different types of inventions that they cover, that they are not helpful for technology benchmarking purposes anymore.

Additional information regarding the simple family definition is available on the website of the EPO.

To evaluate the current strength of a patent portfolio or identify the relevant IP of a company only active patent families should be taken into account. The inactive ones are mostly not of interest, though they can also be included. The main data source for the legal event information is the INPADOC database, which is updated on a weekly basis.

We carefully interpret the various event codes to determine the legal status of the documents in a family at each given point in time. In the next step, we aggregate the legal status information per document on the patent family level using sophisticated heuristics.

The heuristics applied for the interpretation have been developed and implemented in close cooperation with well-known legal status experts from industry and patent offices. Currently, further national registers are being evaluated to be included as primary sources of legal status information in the future.

For the correct evaluation of patent portfolios, it is crucial to know the current owner of a patent family, which can be quite difficult. There are many different applicant names a company uses to file a patent, which can include misspelling and translation errors. In addition, tracking patent ownership over time is intricate: companies merge, change their names, sell and acquire business units, sell and buy patents, etc. Identifying the current owner of all relevant patents requires substantial effort, which is not possible by computer algorithms alone. Specific expert research is required to accurately track patent ownership over time for each individual company.

PatentSight+ identifies patent ownership based on extensive research on corporate structure, M&A, spin-offs, company name changes, and patent transactions amongst others. In doing so, PatentSight+ contains company structures including all domestic and foreign subsidiaries, joint ventures and group companies. The harmonized ultimate owner also includes former names of the company itself or any of its subsidiaries. The assumption is that usually, the parent company (ultimate owner) has control over the patents of a subsidiary or an affiliate company.