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Mind Mapping for IP Portfolios

Feb 10, 2017

Capture, Organize, Analyze, Report

The new modules released in Relecura's 2017 release have introduced IP Knowledge Management to the platform, an industry-first. However, there is another aspect that has gone under the radar. The three modules - the Taxonomy Builder, Portfolio Manager, and Automated Reports - have also enabled a slightly different, and in many cases, a more efficient portfolio analysis workflow, with a faster time to insight.

Context and Comparison

Enterprises with reasonably sized portfolios (say 1000 patent families or more) repeatedly do any number of the following exercises. The portfolio is typically partitioned based on different criteria - based on technologies, coverage of specific product lines, patents that can be either licensed or sold. These criteria change with time and business environment, and in turn, the categorization of the portfolio has to reflect these changes. Competitive intelligence requires that the portfolios of competitors need to be tracked and compared for relative strengths. The dynamic business environment forces the IP analyst to obtain different views of the relevant portfolios in order to compare and draw insights. Further, subject matter experts are often called upon to work with IP analysts to lend their expertise in specific domains. They work in tandem to craft queries that accurately identify specific patents in the portfolio. These queries can be captured using the Taxonomy Builder. Over time, the various taxonomies built, form a rich knowledge base. Work done once can be reused, if required, in a future analysis without the need to craft fresh queries. The Taxonomy Builder makes use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to parse the portfolio as well and suggest appropriate queries to identify the patents addressing the key technologies. The taxonomies may be tweaked, modified, and reconfigured as required. Typically, when analyzing a portfolio, the analyst would determine the makeup of the overall portfolio in terms of technologies, geographies and other parameters. Queries would be framed for each of the subsets of interest, and the relevant patents identified. This process would have to be repeated for each of the domains of interest. The same exercise would have to be undertaken on the portfolios of the competitors for the purposes of comparison. In contrast, in Relecura's Knowledge Management scenario, mapping a taxonomy to a portfolio, surfaces the relevant patents matching each of the nodes. This is done in the Portfolio Manager. This offers a structured hierarchical view of the portfolio with convenient drill-down. One may obtain analytics on any of the nodes of the taxonomy. Further, multiple portfolios may be stacked and comparative analytics obtained in the same manner.

Advantages over traditional portfolio analysis workflow

The description of the use of Relecura's IP Knowledge Management modules suggests the following advantages in comparison to the more traditional portfolio analysis workflow. Do contact us at support@relecura.com for a demo. We will be happy to set one up for you.

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