Top applicants will extract the number of patent families per company (assignee). By default, the presented data shows all assignees. The user can group and rename different companies/subsidiaries in the section “List of assignees to investigate” by using drag & drop. These will be the companies to be presented in the analysis.

By using the slider on top, the user can select the number of companies to show in the plot.

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Comparing different companies technical strengths and focuses is a great way to get an overview of the competitive landscape. As the patent system is built up with the patent classification codes, these can be used to visualize different companies’ activities and their technical focus areas.

The technology analysis provides a general overview of which technical fields are the most relevant within the portfolio. It is a very important analysis, as the patent classifications that are assigned to a patent document by a patent examiner describe the technical area of the central part of the invention. As the process of assigning a patent classification to a patent document is done by a patent examiner, this part is not controlled by the filing company. A patent document’s title, abstract, and other written parts of a document can be misleading to reveal as little as possible. Thus, a technological classification system is an important key factor in clearly identifying the technological scope of a patent document.

This plot allows the user to analyse and investigate which technical field a competitor is filing their patents in. In this analysis, the user can find out the number of patents in a respective field, or how the patent portfolio is divided in different technological areas. 

You may also switch class systems between CPC or IPC as well as change the level of depth in the classification hierarchy.

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It can be highly interesting to analyze inventors activity, not only can you trace key inventors in a company, you can also trace the persons movement from company to company and the technical fields they are working in. 

This plot gives the user an overview of the top inventors. The user may change the number of inventors to be presented on the plot by editing the number or using the slider. The x-axis represents the inventor, y-axis the number of patent families and z-axis the priority year.

On the settings, the user may change the 3D settings in order to change visualizations.

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It can be highly interesting to analyze inventors activity. Not only can you trace key inventors in a company, you can also trace the persons movement from company to company and the technical fields they are working in. 

The knowledge of the most important inventors and/or R&D teams gives the user possibilities for updating monitoring activities within IAMIP platform. In this way, it is possible to extract additional information of what these inventors, and respectively their companies, are doing. it is additionally possible to identify inventors that could be of interest for the user as an employee candidate.

This plot gives the user an overview of the top inventors. The user may change the number of inventors to be presented on the plot by editing the number or using the slider.

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Comparing different companies patent portfolios and trends of their filings over time is a great way to get an overview of the competitive landscape. Just comparing numbers, i.e amount of patents for a given company, does not say that much. To instead visualize this data gives you a whole new picture. 

The Filing Activity plot shows patent filings over time for the full data of the selected portfolio or a sub-set of data (i.e. whole data set/certain assignee/several assignees). The time domain (x-axis) is related to the priority year, i.e. the year of first filing. The filings over time give the user an insight to R&D focus/commitment of the specific company. For example, have they recently started to become active in this area, or have they been active for several years? Observed changes may require an additional analysis to interpret the reasons for the change. It also offers the possibility to forecast patenting trends.

This plot gives the user an overview of the number of patent families filed over time per assignee. The activity can be presented by type (patent, utility model), status (pending, alive, dead), tags, or applicants. The default value is number of patent families per year. The user can also change the range on the x-axis by using the slider.

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The first evidence of a new product or process may be a published patent application. A common way of getting further insight into competitor’s activity is to analyze their patent documents. But, as a typical analysis can contain a large number of documents, a manual process of analyzing this data set can be very time consuming and error-prone. To overcome these issues, the analysis feature has been developed specifically to help the user to execute the desired tasks in an automated and fast way.

The type of information that can be uncovered by patent analysis includes:  

• Identification of competitors (or collaborators)  
• Scope and direction of competitor R&D effort  
• Competitor country filing strategies  
• Evolution of a technological area  
• Identification of key inventors  
• Comparison between your patent portfolio and competitor patent portfolios 

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Patent protection for an invention is valid for 20 years from the application’s filing date. There are however some cases where you can apply for an extended period of five years of protection. Especially for patents pertaining to medicinal products and plant protection products, the term of protection can be extended by up to five years. This extension is called a Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC).

When a patents validity has expired, the SPC protection may begin. The SPC covers the active compound/compounds that are protected by the patent.

SPC is common when it comes to patents in the pharmaceutical sector and extends the duration of the patent in order to compensate the patent owner for the time between patent filing and and when the product is authorized for sale, which usually is a long time and a complex procedure.

For more information click here.

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The majority of countries priority numbers are made up of a country code (two letters), the year of filing (four digits), and a serial number (variable, maximum seven digits).

Some countries use other formats. These are Australia, Germany, China, Brazil, Ukraine, Gulf Council, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, OAPI and WIPO.
Their application numbers are made up of:

• a country code (two letters)
• the year of filing (four digits)
• “other” information (one or two characters)
• a serial number (five or six digits)

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Patent classifications are used by patent offices to assign patent applications, issued patents and utility models to technical areas and thus make them retrievable. All technical areas are covered. 

The patent classifications are assigned upon filing a patent and during the examining process by the examiners. The first assigned classes are shown in the patent document. Classes can be amended during the examination process if new aspects are added or if the first assignment was incomplete or wrong. These amendments are reported by the patent offices and are available in databases,  such as the DOCDB of the European Patent Office.

The most important patent classifications are the International Patent Classification (IPC) and the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).

Patent offices worldwide use the IPC. There are approximately 70 000 different IPC codes for different technical areas.

The CPC is an extension of the IPC and includes approximately 250 000 classification entries.

More on IPC, or
More on CPC.

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FI [File Index] and F-term [File forming term] are Japanese patent classification systems, consisting of approx. 190,000 and 360,000 entries, respectively, which enable efficient searches for patent documents.

The FI codes are based on the IPC [International Patent Classification].

Here you can find more information on classifications such as IPC, CPC, US classes and ECLA.

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