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Patents reveal what competitors have up their sleeves Online databases can yield clues on innovation efforts, says Evalueserve
http://www.research-live.com/news_story.aspx?pageid=30&r=y&newsid=3871

INDIA-- Research and analytics firm Evalueserve has been demonstrating the competitive intelligence that can be gleaned from the internet’s patent databases.

In an exercise designed to showcase some of the techniques behind its bespoke services, the firm looked at patents held or applied for by technology giants Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo and Google. Among its discoveries is that Google may be working on a Google Phone, and targeting the TV and videogame advertising markets.

Evalueserve says the key to finding out what competitors have up their sleeves lies in correlating information from multiple sources. The standard database of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is often the first port of call, but more digging is usually required to find out who each patent belongs to – since ownership details can be withheld, and can change over time.

The firm also trawled through the USPTO’s patent assignment database, which records ownership, as well as files held by the European Patent Office and the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

In Google’s case, less than a quarter of patents and applications could be found through the standard database, said Balwant Rawat, Evalueserve’s manager of intellectual property services. Rawat told Research: “A typical researcher might not be able to identify who is the owner. What we’re seeing is that we can combine several databases to yield a more complete and more reliable search.”

Evalueserve, which employs 210 people in intellectual property research, found hundreds of patents belonging to Google, including a mobile phone case and software relating to mobile telephony. There were also several patents involving the delivery of dynamic videogame ads.

The firm said: “Since these leading edge companies are constantly innovating and creating barriers for their competitors, they are also continuously filing patent applications and getting many if not most of them granted. Hence, searching through databases… is one way of gaining an insight into the strategic direction of these companies.”

Author: Robert Bain
Published on the 29th October 2007