Diving Deep into Patent Data

The financial impact of patents to corporations cannot be denied.  Annual revenues stemming from patent licensing are conservatively estimated to be well over 120 billion dollars in 2008.  Patent licensing revenue often makes up over 10% to 20% of total income in R&D-centric companies.  At the same time, patents are, in effect, pre-paid assets—providing a return on investment well over 95%—if you regard the R&D expenses are costs sunk well before the patent itself is monetized as a stand-alone asset—that is, detached from a particular product.

At the same time, due to international regulations on patent applications, patents are a valuable and unique source of up-to-date scientific and technological information.  Patent applications are published 18 months after the date they are filed, usually before the first action on the patent, and well before the patent is granted.  The consensus among experts we have spoken with suggests that the scientific knowledge contained in patents comprises about 80 percent of all scientific knowledge—making it by far the most useful corpus of data available to the scientific or innovation researcher inside of today's corporations.  While 80% may sound reasonable (or not) at first glance, its accuracy can be further argued by analyzing the real data in the body of patent citations.  The importance of patent data to the corporate technology researcher is further amplified by the fact that nowhere else in the world is so much technological information available in one place. Learn more...

A Viable Online Market for IP, or Just Another Fish Story?

Many tall tales have been told about the emergence of a functional and active online marketplace for IP—a "place" where you could list your patent rights for sale and access the vas... Learn more...