IPWARE-SUMMIT 2011
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION ON SOFTWARE FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
5 - 7 October 2011 - Sanremo, Italy
 
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IPWARE-SUMMIT 2009
IPWARE-SUMMIT 2012
 
Managing your patent portfolio and monitoring patent trends using the EPO's tools

Johannes Schaaf, Administrator Patent Information Promotion & Training, European Patent Office

Abstract

New tools from the EPO help people manage their IP and visualise patent statistics for trend analysis and competitor watch

- The free IPscore software (www.epo.org/ipscore) provides a means of evaluating and optimising a company's own patent portfolio. The talk will show how to compare the results from IPscore with other patent indicators (citation information, family size etc.) to improve the quality of the evaluation.

- An example based on Lithium battery technology will demonstrate the new visualisation tool (www.epo.org/searching/subscription/expert.html) and ways to identify the latest technological trends by analysing IPC-IPC co-assignments even before new IPC classes emerge.

- The presentation will also describe the ways that large organisations (EUROTSTAT, OECD...) use the EPO's database for patent statistics (EPO PATSTAT - www.epo.org/searching/subscription/raw/product-14-24.html) and how they solve the name harmonisation problem. It will address how to use EPO PATSTAT to answer complex questions, e.g. "which applications have inventors or applicants from more than one country?" or "what is the technological distribution of a company's patent portfolio?". The second example will be used to discuss how far analysing the first IPC symbol on a patent document, all IPCs or fractional counting of IPC symbols can deliver different results, and which one to choose for which purpose.

The final element of the talk will be a demonstration of how to plug EPO data into commercial business intelligence tools.


Speaker Biography

Johannes Schaaf studied physics in Kiel (D) and Bologna (IT) and received an MBA from the Henley Management College (UK). He developed optical scanners and acoustic process control systems in the Corporate Technology of the Siemens company. He was a consultant in the area of product definition and led the Community of Practice Innovation Management. Johannes Schaaf worked at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office as a patent examiner in the area of laser physics. At the EPO in Vienna he is now responsible for the area business use of patent information and application manager for the worldwide database for patent statistics PATSTAT and the patent portfolio evaluation tool IPscore.