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IoT Patents – Landscape and Commercialization Trends (Report)

One can better understand the IoT landscape by employing patent taxonomies of the relevant technologies and application verticals. IoT involves several technologies and a variety of applications specific to different industry sectors. One of the better ways to understand this varied and dynamic domain is by employing patent taxonomies of the relevant technologies and applications in tandem with analytics - to study portfolios of various players in the IoT ecosystem. Relecura’s latest IP Intelligence Report elaborate on how the above approach can help us gain insights into the technology, IP commercialization trends, and opportunities in IoT. Some top-level findings are listed below:

Business Insights

• IoT covers a broad range of categories with close to 130,000 published patent documents pertaining to distinct inventions.
• The major IoT players seem to be acquiring companies working on technology products for the upper layers of the IoT stack (IoT applications and services, analytics; IoT platform offerings), in preference to companies with products for specific IoT application areas.

IP Insights

• The top patent holders in IoT, are from diverse sectors like semiconductor and electronics (Samsung, LG, Sony); telecom (Huawei, Ericsson, Korea Electronics Telecom, ZTE), and software (IBM, Microsoft).
• Samsung leads in terms of total published patents with a total of just over 4,500, including more than 2,000 in the last two years alone.
• Employing Relecura’s patent quality metric, Qualcomm comes out on top with 852 of the company’s assets with a Star Rating of 3.5 or higher, followed by Intel (412 high-quality patent assets) and Samsung (393 high-quality patent assets).
• Avago, Google, Samsung, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent are the key companies acquiring IoT patents.

The full report can be read here. Our earlier reports are archived here.

Evolution of this report

Back in January, we sent out a quick snapshot report of  IoT patent landscape which gave a fairly high-level view of this sector. Recently in April 2017, we had the opportunity to present in a LES (Licensing Executives Society) webinar session on IoT. The webinar looked into the taxonomy and IP Commercialization aspects of IoT. Shortly thereafter, we took part in a luncheon session at the LES Spring meeting just last week, where we were on a panel along with other industry leaders – discussing trends and opportunities in IoT. We did a fair bit more of analysis to come up with fresh insights to better flesh out the IoT business and IP landscape. These new findings are presented in (what we are calling) our New and Improved IoT IP Intelligence Report. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome. Get in touch with us if you would like to know more about specific aspects of the report or would like to get deeper insights into specific IoT application verticals or the technology stack. We would love to hear from you.