Screening Inventions with a 360o view of its Impact on a Corporation

The Situation
The research and development team generates new ideas and passes them to the IP team
through invention disclosures. The IP team looks for the novelty and patentability of each
idea finds out if the invention is in a technical area of focus of the company, identify the
importance of the invention for competitive advantage, estimate the commercial value
of potential patents based on the idea, decide if the idea should be patented, and
generate a report based on the learnings.
Earlier Solution
The IP team read the invention disclosures to understand the invention, created multiple
search strings to retrieve a list of related documents using a generic IP search tool, and
read through hundreds of documents to identify the prior-art. It took a professional
between 10-12 hours per invention to generate the final list of documents and the report.
A few drawbacks of the solution were that (i) sizeable manual effort was made by domain
experts to understand the idea and to come up with relevant search strings, (ii) the final
list of retrieved documents was too long that it took hours for the domain experts to
review the documents to identify relevant ones, and (ii) the tools did not provide strategic
information relevant to making decisions on filing for patents.
Current Solution
The team uses a two-step process on prior-art search; the first is fully automated, AI-based invention screening using Novelty. The second involves a comprehensive prior-art
search using the enterprise web tool from Relecura. Just by copying and pasting a
paragraph of text from the invention disclosure to Novelty, the user receives a summary

With Custom AI Tool
The custom AI model from Relecura captures the technologies of the company into AI
classification models first. With the input of invention disclosure, the system would
provide a consolidated set of insights sufficient to decide on filing for patents based on
the invention. The insights include a summary graph of the invention, the technology
category the invention belongs to, the competitive and industry trends for the technology
category, relevant invention disclosures submitted earlier, related patents of the
company and its competitors, and relevant prior-art.

The benefits of the custom AI solution include (i) getting all relevant information
necessary to decide on patent filing in one place and (ii) providing a custom workflow to
avoid the learning curve of the users. This saves time and manual effort and improves the
accuracy of patent filing based decisions.