Using Patent Information to Identify Marketing Trends
Based on An Article by David T. Dickens, Questel-Orbit, Washington DC

Patent information can reveal important details that can be crucial to a company's success. Important marketing and innovative trend information that can greatly help a corporation compete today can be gleaned from identifying the top patenting companies in certain technologies or analyzing a competitor's patent portfolio.

Patenting costs represent a significant investment for any company.  It may benefit businesses tom competitively analyze their own and their competitors' patenting efficiency - their rate of success in getting their patents granted.  By analyzing the ratio of patent grants to published applications, countries and companies that are better than others in the patenting process can be determined.

The European Patent Office:

Since the EPO offers patenting protection through Europe, companies throughout the world usually file patent applications thee. From 1996 to 200, published applications to the EPO have increased 57%, showing the growing global importance of the Office.

Dates covered by this analysis are from 1978, the beginning of  EPO publications, until the first week of June 2001.  For this period there were 1,101,569 published applications and 515,153 grants. Dividing the grants by the published applications gives a ratio of 46.8% of applications that are successful. This is a baseline against which the success ratio of applications by country and company can be evaluated.

Country Analysis:

There ar five contries that make up 80% of published applications and 81% of grants.  These countries are the US, Germany, Japan, France and the UK. The US leads the world in EP published applications with 311,549 and granted patents, with 122,103.

Germany has fewer published applications that the US, but the number of grants is only 5,000 lower. This means that German companies have a higher success rate in getting their published applications granted - a higher grant-to-published-application ratio. The US, on the other hand, is the only country of the five countries examined that has a lower percentage of total EP grants to published applications. The US ratio is 39%, considerably lower than the EPO baseline of 46.8% and lower than Germany, Japan, France and Great Britain.

US EPO published applications shows that 70% of these applications directly resulted in US patents - and considerably fewer-39%- of these same EPO applications became EPO granted patents.  Because of the difference in the patent process of the US Patent Office, the analysis of applications that directly result in US patents can be difficult to obtain.

USPTO applications may include divisionals, continuations,continuations-in-part (CIPs), and some of the US applications may actually be abandoned and not directly result in US patents. Though the applications may be abandoned, they can be referenced in US patents, and may indirectly result in multiple US patents. If we were to analyze the applications that directly and indirectly resulted in US patents, the analysis would show that these same US RP applications resulted in more than 100% US patents.

Example:

US application 1995US-0451155 did not directly result in a US patent because it was abandoned, but indirectly resulted in 27 US patents.

Company Filings:

The same type of grant-to-published application analysis can also be performed for company filings to evaluate their success rates.  Two major EPO filers are IBM  of the US and Siemens of Germany. These companies account for the majority of the published applications that do not reach or have not yet reached the grant stage, but because they have so many published applications, their ratios are higher than their country base lines.  By incorporating a grant-to-published application ratio, companies can evaluate the efficiency of their own patent filing process, and compare it to that of their competitors, both nationally and internationally.

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