INNPERSPECTIVE

A Series of Industry Focused Articles
Read about the latest trends and updates in the intellectual property industry from the Innography perspective.

Breaking the Information Barrier

Monday 01, June 2009 by Tyron Stading

There is a continuous question in analysis: Do you have enough of the right information to make a smart decision?  Without the right information, there can be blind spots, gaps, or incomplete answers.  Too often people have access to the right information, but do not incorporate it because it is too difficult to consolidate and bring it all together. It is largely a matter of simplicity — how easy is it to get the right information?  Think of your own job; you know your company has knowledge about licensing deals, litigation, etc, but how often do you include it for competitive intelligence?

There is a significant barrier today in which a vast amount of internal knowledge about a subject exists, but it is nearly impossible to incorporate that with external analytics.

It’s almost universally the case, for example, that research teams and companies develop their own taxonomies of patents, and they usually view these patents in the context of the market. For instance, a consumer packaged goods company might develop a patent taxonomy such as the following: an oral hygiene patents group containing a toothpaste patents group, which in turn contains a group of tooth-whitening patents. (e.g. Oral Hygiene/Toothpaste/Tooth-Whitening).

This taxonomy is often constructed by internal annotations that have no meaning to public sources (such as the patent office), which has its own taxonomy of patent classifications. The researcher must cope with two views of the same set of IP data. Compound that with other annotations such as licensing deals on patents, patent infringement threats and most prolific inventors, and you have a lot of internal data to manage — in addition to externally available information.

We hear from customers a lot that they want a Single View of their research.  While they have created internal research and purchased public research, they rarely have the time or the skills needed to merge the two views together.  This causes frustration among researchers because they HAVE the information but no way to tell a unified story.

Furthermore, they have multiple groups generating new and fresh research, but each is often on a different system each of which might not communicate with each other. The information, then, often goes unused.  If they only had a "Single View" they could seamlessly do patent research and share it between groups.  This would improve the quality of analysis, increase productivity, improve speed, etc.  Until now, there have been huge challenges in making the all data work together.

Innography addresses this problem in our latest release, Innography Spring ’09, with an extension of our collaborative feature, Projects. As you accumulate information you can immediately populate it in a Project. Any private data, such as market segment revenues for a specific company or internal assignments and workflows can be can now be captured and put into a Project using the Import feature. This data can then be overlaid with externally available data such as competitive patent portfolio data and citation analysis. You can then organize all of that combined information in any way that makes sense to your organization.  Innography can correlate on Patents, Companies, IP Litigation, and other nouns.

The system also enables you to annotate all of the data in a project. For example, if someone is assigned to in-license a particular patent that was discovered you can make a note of that fact along with the progress of that effort.

Your internal patent taxonomies are also created quite naturally through the use of labels. These labels can be used to set up hierarchical structures in your project very much like hierarchical file structures.

You can also share all of this information with your team immediately. Any user can be given access to a project by the project owner, in which case that user can view all the project data as it is added. Users can then update the project as they uncover new data and make progress within their workflows.

The results can also be shared by e-mail with other team members and even people such as clients and partners who are not users of the system. Users of the system can receive a URL to the visualization or other exposed data, and the graphic representation of the data can also be sent to an external recipient as an attachment.

All of this new capability produces a multiplicative effect on projects. Users are more apt to use the system and, as a natural consequence, will make the data available to other users, simply by saving it in a project as a matter of course. As other users come into possession of the results they will be more inclined to move their part of the project forward and share their findings with the team as well.

Innography also has the capability to store project data behind your firewall. As you add data within an Innography project, Innography can store all project data behind your firewall seamlessly. Users with very sensitive project data can use this new feature to add another layer of security if needed.

All of this new capability can accelerate the work performed by research teams and individuals.  Rather than a negative feedback loop, a positive feedback loop tends to develop, which causes the project to gather momentum.

As I mentioned in my last blog, I don’t like talking about the competition, but it’s my opinion that elsewhere in the industry these sorts of collaborative tools are sadly lacking. This is just the kind of thing we all should be offering to truly service the market in the way we should.


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