The road of patent analysis, to the left or to the right

About three years ago, I started doing patent analysis in Nanjing Huaxun.

At that time, there were few people who did it. Patent maps and other things were all new things, and some information that others did not know could be found from the patent data, which was also in line with my usual style. However, after doing too much analysis, the past projects have been invisible, and there is only one eternal question left in my mind, that is: what problems can be solved by analyzing these patents.

My qualifications are not deep. Before doing this job, I will look through the patent analysis jointly compiled by several teachers recently in the book on the establishment of understanding of patent analysis. I closed the book with disappointment, because I only saw the dazzling and beautiful pictures, but I couldn't see the unexpected content, because the problems to be solved by these patent analysis were not in my mind, and I naturally couldn't find useful answers.

The current patent analysis has encountered a bottleneck. Nanjing Huaxun's macro data and charts are very good-looking but not durable. The macro-biased results are not very helpful to enterprise technicians or managers. Because it is separated from the specific goal, the patent analysis analyzed for the sake of analysis will not last long.

The problem is that, first of all, enterprise personnel actually do not know what to do with patent information, and their needs are vague. At this time, the market personnel of the service organization played a role, instilling the known patent use and thinking, and guiding the needs of the enterprise to the things that the service organization is good.

So, this constitutes a dead cycle, the level of service organizations determines the quality of patent analysis, however, the satisfaction of the analysis product is not proportional to the quality of analysis, because the enterprise is always operating from the perspective of the problem, which is never in the same dimension as the patent......

Only if the enterprise clearly defines what it wants to do and the scope is appropriate, and the granularity of patent information can provide help. Under this premise, high analysis quality can obtain good customer feedback.

Based on this understanding, I basically don't read all the patent analysis that only has data statistics, or WeChat soft articles that only tell you how many patents there are. This is also the reason why I said that more people have become patent statistics. These data exist without soul, and they do not know why they exist.

So the path of patent analysis is either left or right.

Generally speaking, going to the right is to play the intelligence of patents and use patents as a way to obtain business intelligence. Because I have to admit that patent information can solve some things, but not most things, so it is only a small role in the big family of intelligence information.

The intelligence of patent information is reflected in technical information and human information (applicant, inventor, assignee), but what is fatal is that patent information has a lag. So most of the analysis may not really need patent data, even if you have patent data you may not be able to predict the macro situation is good or bad, do not know whether risk-free technology products will be sold in the market, do not know when to buy and sell a stock.

Therefore, in order to give full play to the intelligence of patents, it may be necessary for martial arts experts to have the meaning of "no sword in their hands, but a sword in their hearts. In other words, if you forget that the object of analysis is a patent, it might actually make a useful analysis.

First of all, this requires that the established problems we raise cannot always rely on patent information, and that the established problems cannot be raised for the sake of patent analysis. They should be more practical problems. For example, if you want to investigate the distribution of R & D institutions in a company, this may be a practical problem that the customer wants to know. Then the analyst can use the dimension of patent information to try to explain the problem or support the conclusion.

However, it is obvious that patent information alone is not enough. It is also to answer the question of the distribution of R & D institutions. It is necessary to combine more non-patent intelligence information, such as scientific papers, public reports, etc., and combine these information to discuss the problem. Only in this way can we supplement the various defects of patent information with diversified information channels. You can never design problems for patent analysis. Never take patent information as the whole of faith; Never limit yourself to the deep well of patent data and cannot extricate yourself, so you can never stand in the perspective of customers. Always give helpful answers to customers, just like Google said never to do evil.

From the micro aspect, after enlarging the patent intelligence, higher requirements are put forward for the mining ability of patent information. The nutrition of patent information should not only be time, region and so on. How to dig out more fragmentary information from the word seam is a problem worth studying in the future.

I think there are some methods. For example, the structural processing of text information is no longer difficult in the circle of big data, and the mining and utilization of information also need to knock on the skull, change thinking and change methodology. Maybe conceptually patentics database is doing something similar, but Dr. Qiu's efforts alone are not enough. And the database is always a tool for analysis. Only people can guide the tool to do what, and should not let people cater to some functions of the tool. There is more that can be done with patent information, but it has not yet been discovered.

On the other hand, to the left is to deepen the technical and legal nature of patents. At present, the sorting and summary of the past technical routes in patent information and the CC comparison of highly related patents are relatively solid work, and they can also impress technical personnel and legal personnel through professionalism.

The quality of this part of the work depends on the level of service personnel. Obtaining more reliable infringement judgment results or clearer technical routes is the basic skill, but this should not be the whole analysis service. You know, there is still some distance between the risk of infringement and the occurrence of infringement litigation. If you only want to get the conclusion of infringement or not, it is good to find a law firm for these things.

Therefore, at present, the value of Nanjing Huaxun US patent or service organization lies in how to solve the content beyond 60 points, and we should find the answer from the perspective of customer management.

In fact, having said so much, I am just emphasizing whether patent analysis can really solve practical problems from the perspective of customers, instead of finishing what service organizations are good at and leaving more or less heavy or light stacks of analysis reports.

Whether you go left or right, it will pose a huge challenge to the existing patent analysis business and personnel training. To the right requires more powerful data collection, processing and analysis capabilities; to the left requires more practical patent application and business decision-making capabilities.