“Which of our patents cover what the competitors are doing?”
“Where are the holes in our patent coverage?”
“Which of our patents cover our products?”
“What the heck is in our patent portfolio?!?!”
A patent portfolio is both a sword and a shield; leverage
your analysis with Clearstone Elements to wield both with agility.
These are some of the most critical questions asked of in-house patent counsel, but they can also be the most dreaded. Experienced practitioners know there are no easy answers. Reliable results can be expensive and are often reached only after a significant investment in time.
ClearstoneIP is changing all of that.
In any strategic patent assessment, whether defensive or offensive, it is critical to know what technologies, products, or processes are actually covered by a particular portfolio. Patent metrics based on bibliographic and other surface data only go so far; these critical questions can only be answered with an in-depth analysis of patent claims.
For example, the cornerstone to any successful licensing program is “to have a detailed understanding of what you own and where the most value lies. It is also important to have an understanding of the technologies within your patent portfolio and how they are connected (a “taxonomy”).” In an effective defensive strategy, “good portfolio management requires monitoring of your competition’s patent holdings to identify opportunities and threats.” Key to these efforts is not just having a vague sense of generally protected subject matter, but identifying specific product-to-patent correlations with confidence and agility.
That’s why we’ve built the ideal platform for capturing and interacting with patent portfolio analysis. After a one-time effort to index a patent collection, Clearstone Elements leverages that analysis to yield powerful results, including the ability to:
- Map competitor products to your patent portfolio in minutes to discover the patents that are most likely to be infringed. The process can be repeated for any number of products, with each mapping typically taking less than 30 minutes (even for large portfolios that include thousands of patents).
- Map your products to your patent portfolio to determine whether your portfolio provides adequate protection for your product line and to discover gaps in coverage. This is also a convenient way to manage patent marking.
- Mix and match product mappings to different portfolios or collections of patents to assess offensive and defensive strategies with respect to various alignments. In Elements, users perform a product mapping by interacting with a hierarchy of technical elements irrespective of the underlying patents. The user can map a product once and apply the mapping to different patent sets interchangeably, a truly unique capability that only ClearstoneIP can offer.
- Quickly adapt product mappings to account for product changes over time to zero in on which patents become relevant due to the changes.
- Apply saved product mappings to patents and portfolios indexed later in time. The unique nature of Elements offers a mechanism that instantly compares saved product mappings to any patents that are indexed at a later time. So when newly issued/acquired patents are indexed, Clearstone Elements will instantly inform the user which of these patents are likely to cover previously mapped products.
The Elements platform provides a degree of patent omniscience that some of our users have likened to “seeing the matrix.”
Sign up for a Clearstone Elements trial account today to start leveraging your patent portfolio analysis for insight and efficiency.