Patent Landscaping; an art, to search for art

Inventions and their subsequent patents can be deemed to be analogous to lodging of mines in a predefined area; said pre-defined area being the technical or scientific (metaphoric) area. As and how patents are granted, progressivity of science is defined and each granted patent is a milestone, or better still, in confirming with the discussion of this article, a mine. Further, analogically speaking, it is in everyone’s best interests to be wary of the mines whilst treading the pre-defined area, in that, it means that it is necessary to understand the nature and construction of a patent before exercising any technology, for it may happen that an exercise may lead to setting off the mine by infringing patent rights. Subsequent effects of booming of such mines maybe just as catastrophic considering that typical litigation bills run up to crores of rupees and hundreds of thousands of dollars!

Hence, just as it is necessary to invest in a strong research oriented outlook, it is just of equivalent importance to pre-empt such threats by warding off wayward wandering and adorning a pro-active due-diligent outlook. The art of landscaping (in patents), hence involves a methodology to scale the exact nature of the invention in the vast realm of existing prior art and to map the specifics of the current art with the prior art to understand the ground that has already been traversed, and to understand potentially traversable grounds.

A step wise procedure for an effective landscaping technique and report includes:

- understanding the subject matter by defining an outlining scaffold to define its perimeter, and its intermittent support structures;

- deriving keywords resembling the same outlining scaffold and intermittent structures, and drawing out alternative search-words for the same;

- formulating a query and running it in a plurality of databases to formulate a ‘good’ hit-list of relevant patents/patent applications;

- analyzing the claims of each of the searched and identified patents/patent applications in order to map the claims of the ‘relevant’ documents to the subject matter so as to arrive at a mapping quotient.

The mapping quotient eventually lies in a detailed analysis of similarities and dissimilarities between patents and the subject matter.

The entire genesis of a technological area is clearly visible once a successful patent landscape report is formulated; which includes the need for emergence of the technological area in line with the adage that ‘necessity is the mother of all inventions’, progressive advances in the area, the interdependence of this technological area upon other technological areas, gaps and jumps in the genesis, and a proposed plausible future course of action in the same area.

How this helps a research firm is that it can now, nitpick upon the gaps and dig the same to scavenge for potential markets.