This year the theme of World Intellectual Property Day is “Women and IP: Accelerating innovation and creativity.” ClarivateTM helps companies accelerate innovation, achieve long-term growth and realize sustainable success. We are proud to continue the global celebration of World IP Day by spotlighting our women IP experts, whose ingenuity and talent pave the way to major breakthroughs. Here is our next story in the series spotlighting Sandra Mau, Vice President of TrademarkVision and IP Government Solutions at Clarivate.
To sum up her passion for the intellectual property (IP) industry, Sandra Mau says it lies in “being able to innovate, work with a great team and help our clients get to the answers they need faster and easier.”
Sandra’s career in IP started by chance, quite similar to the story of Vanessa Clabau. Yet, her career in IP has become a lifelong love. Sandra was a researcher who launched a startup centered around the idea of leveraging image recognition technology for online reputation management. This idea pivoted to helping brands protect their logos and eventually narrowed down to trademarks, which resulted in the launch of TrademarkVision.
Revolutionary solution to advance the IP ecosystem
Today, Clarivate is proud of this revolutionary solution which proved to be very valuable in the field of trademark, industrial design and patent image search. It combines global datasets and innovative AI technology, applying the principles of facial recognition technology and the latest in deep learning to visually search artwork, brand images and even 3D design patents for IP research. This is where Sandra feels at home.
As Vice President of TrademarkVision and Government Solutions, Sandra is gratified to be a part of the team that enables the intellectual property ecosystem advance by supporting solutions that help examiners and the public develop and protect IP.
The commitment that Sandra and her team have made to accelerate innovation is reflected in the way they help IP offices modernize and enhance various workflows. By leveraging AI/image search, IP offices can accelerate examination times, increase accuracy and reduce backlogs by delivering faster, more confident decisions. TrademarkVision represents a dramatic shift because in the past, as Sandra explains, for images, users had to rely on image coding systems that were manually coded and frequently inconsistently applied. Another challenge was to leverage image codes for searching since describing a logo in words can be subjective and filtering on codes alone did not rank results by image similarity. Due to all this, IP professionals would spend many hours in the past scanning through images to try to find any ones of concerns. “With AI / Image recognition, we re-rank those images by visual and semantic similarity to make searches faster and more accurate,” Sandra says.
From business opportunities to true friendships
With rapid evolvement of the IP landscape, Sandra perceives that there is an increasing presence of women in leadership positions in the traditionally male-dominated legal field. This is particularly noticeable in Patent and Trademark Offices (PTOs) and corporations. Although women still accounted for only 16.2% for all innovators listed in Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications in 2021, the share of women in patenting space has grown over the past 10 years.
“I find people in IP are generally very friendly and progressive, so I think the trend for more women in IP leadership positions will continue to increase.”
For people considering finding their career path in the IP industry, Sandra encourages them to “attend conferences, put yourself out there and network! The people are nice and the work is interesting, so it’s usually pretty easy to spark up a good conversation.” According to her own experience, the IP industry is small enough for anyone to frequently meet familiar faces at different events and it is not unusual for these encounters to turn into great friendships or business opportunities over time.
Read more from our blog series on Clarivate women experts.
To learn how our experts help you maximize your IP potential, check our IP Intelligence solutions.
