Posts Tagged: "GreyB Services"

Patent Trends Study Part One: Twelve-Industry Overview

This is the first in a thirteen-part series of articles authored by Kilpatrick Townsend that IPWatchdog will be publishing over the coming weeks. The series will examine industry-specific patent trends across 12 key patent-intensive industries. Companies are frequently faced with high- and low-level decisions concerning patenting. What should an annual patent budget be and/or how many new applications should be filed each year? Which technologies should be emphasized in the portfolio? For a given innovation, should a patent application even be filed? These questions are frequently evaluated by looking at internal factors, such as recent enterprise-wide profitability, executive sentiments towards patenting, and/or the perceived importance of individual projects. However, the effect of a patent is to exclude others from a given innovation space. If no other entity was or would be interested in making, using, selling, or importing a patented invention, one could argue that the patent was valueless. Conversely, if many others are actively developing technology within a space, a patent portfolio in that area may be particularly valuable. Thus, patenting decisions should factor in the degree to which others have interest in a given technology is trending-up or -down. Patenting data can serve as one indicator for this type of interest. However, it is difficult to collect patenting data at an industry level. While the patent office assigns an art unit and a class to each patent application, using one or more art units and/or classes as a proxy for an industry is both under- and over-inclusive. For example, a patent application related to an Internet of Things (IoT) industry may also relate to traffic lights, such that, even if there were art units specifically and only associated with either IoT or traffic lights (which there is not), statistics would be inaccurate: statistics pertaining only to an IoT art unit would not account for data corresponding to applications and assigned to the hypothetical traffic-light art unit, while statistics pertaining to both art units would be based on non-IoT applications assigned to the latter art unit.