IP rights systems make it possible to disseminate technological information, especially considering the characteristics of patent documents that are drawn up from the notion of clarity and descriptive sufficiency of technology that you want to protect. Such documents have a format internationally standardized format that facilitates recovery information and documents themselves in the database.

Data structured by the proprietary offices themselves intellectual property of each country. Using the Internet, these records can be freely accessible anywhere in the world and supported by electronic translations, researchers can benefit by extracting knowledge related to the most various technical areas developed in any country. This availability and access to information serves as a lever for continuous product and process improvements productive, as anyone, researcher or entrepreneur can work to improve or invent around the invention patent disclosed. Therefore, it is recommended that regularly patent searches as well as to support a project. In addition, access to this kind of information is part of the strategies and intelligence competitive business.

Due to the wealth of information and standardization from patent documents, organizations’ R&D centers, especially those in developing countries such as Brazil, should use this information more frequently as a way of creating competitive intelligence and boosting entrepreneurship with higher technological content. There are several purposes attributed to information from patents:

• Pursuit of Priority in Conducted Patent Examination
  Examiners of national patent offices to verify that the patent application meets the legal requirements for granting or refusal (novelty, inventive step and industrial application);
• Search for anteriority by researchers before filing a new patent application with the purpose of verifying that the developing invention is already composes the state of the art;
• Seeking invalidity of litigation, that is, analyzing the legal status of the patent for the purpose of the defense by the accused offender
• Search of the state of the art, that is, to know which the antecedents in a particular technical field are
• Technology Monitoring Studies with Objectives to know:
  1. The evolution of technologies over time to identify opportunities for improvement, technological diffusion, technological convergences, among others.
  2. The main actors (patent holders and inventors) in a particular technological field, national and international collaboration networks, monitoring competitors, identifying new market entrants, among others.
  3. Geographic distribution – have a market view, knowing which countries the technology is protected and where it is generated.

In this context, we will give below a concrete example of technology monitoring in the P&G sector, specifically to learn about oil and gas recovery technologies in onshore and offshore wells. The base research conducted using PatSeer® that allows recovery patent documents published in more than 106 countries, totaling 127 million records. The survey was conducted in May of this year and used associated keywords were P&G recovery using different techniques known in the Market such as: steam, water or gas injection, plasma, laser, etc.