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.- In Relecura's IP Knowledge Management system, the specification of patents of interest is captured upfront with the assistance of subject matter experts and AI. These may be modified and reused as required, thus saving time and effort.
- The above is a one-time exercise. Relevant patents and analytics for each of the nodes of the taxonomy are surfaced on mapping the taxonomies to portfolios. This typically gives a faster time to insight.
- The portfolio knowledge is represented in a hierarchical fashion. This representation in a visual hierarchical manner has parallels to mind mapping. The portfolio is visually organized. One can see the connections and relationships between the various portfolio categories, enabling a guided exploration of the complete portfolio.
- The categories themselves are flexible and may be specified collaboratively. They may also be reused in future analyses. Taxonomies can be easily tweaked based on changing business imperatives. This makes it easy to run what-if scenarios.
- The portfolio visualization is top-down. One can get a high-level view and analytics of the portfolio (say for top management). On the other hand, one can also drill-down to specific sub-technologies and do a more thorough analysis (for IP analysts).
- IP analysts can switch between the visual taxonomy view of the portfolio and other powerful Relecura search and analysis features to study specific subsets in more detail.
- Readable reports can be generated for any of the nodes, tailoring the content for the intended audience with the most essential insights.
