Identify license opportunities in your patent portfolio

Derwent research guides

Where does the value in a patent portfolio lie?

Are there protection gaps?

Are there candidates for licensing, litigation, or sale?

Derwent Innovation can help you maximize the value of your patent portfolio. Built-in tools help you quickly perform citation analysis to identify licensing opportunities.

Look at your portfolio: how many citations have your patents received?

Search by publication number in Derwent Innovation to retrieve patents in your portfolio: upload a Text file with the list of Patents number

Identify highly cited patents

Once you have your results add the Count of Citing Refs Patents fields to your table view and sort results by Count of Citing Refs Patents using Advanced Sort tab. Citations made by other assignees may reveal potential licensees or entitles that you should monitor as competitors/infringement risks

 

 

Export in excel the most cited patents

You can manually select them, or you can use filters and select those documents that have been cited more than 50 times.

Exporting your results

Once you have applied the filter you can export your results to create a list of the highly cited patents.

Find potential licensable patents

Copy the number of your most cited documents and paste them into the publication number tab in order to run a forward citation search.

Users with DWPI can select DPCI Patent Citations Forward, which searches citations at the invention level and finds citing patents for the entire DWPI family.

From the list you can see who is citing you, in which technology area are they using their patents, ect. Using the Analyze Records tool or the Insight you can better analyze your results

 

Find potential licensable patents in a technology category

You can identify top citing assignees by running a chart on Top Optimized Assignees:

Use chart filter results

Have a better look at which documents of a particular competitor are citing you.

Identify assignees with closer art (relevance category XY)

Patent examiners for EP and PCT patents file prior art search reports with reasons for references. References types X and Y indicate “not novel” or “obvious” patents, which suggest closer art.

Assignees with citations to patents in your portfolio with these reference types may be prime licensing candidates. Subsearch for Relevance Category, Enter a patent number from your portfolio, SAME, and (X or Y)

Look at new technology spaces

create a chart for the classification you prefer and check if there is any “strange” code used by your competitors, that you normally don’t use. Classes that seem out of place for the technology space may reveal patents for new uses of the underlying technology (drift).

You can even look at the Insights and analyze the “What my competitors are working on?” chart. It provides a visual comparison of the technologies associated with each assignee. You can analyze areas of overlap or unique areas of research. You can focus your attention on those classes last used.