Share The Platform Not The Data – A Fresh Approach To Patent Research Project Delivery

Over the course of developing PatSeer and even well before we started working on it, we’d frequently have discussions with patent research and analysis professionals from corporate organizations as well as service providers. These conversations would bring out a number of inefficiencies in the process of patent research project management and help us identify problems we could solve for them. What would make life easier for the patent data professional and others who work with patent research projects or rely on the outputs?

Of the many issues we ended up identifying during these sessions, one that was commonly voiced was global cross functional collaboration amongst disparate teams over projects that involved working with a lot of files, PDFs, Images and documents. Some examples of these are:

IP managers sending files to R&D or external counsel for feedback or rating on set of records.
Team members spread across countries simultaneously working on the same project
Research team and IP team together working with external open innovation partners.
Corporate IP teams sourcing searches and alerts from multiple service providers spread globally
Service providers delivering raw and analyzed patent information to small and large firms

Patent analysis and research projects typically involve a large amount of data, tagging multiple types of metadata to each record, shifting through images and PDFs, sending portions of data temporarily for feedback and delivering summarized output to stakeholders.

So we thought…why send all this data around sharing files when you can centralize everything and simply share access to a common platform where everyone could collaborate?

What evolved from this line of thought is PatSeer’s extensive sharing and collaboration capabilities. A centralized project platform where you have all the tools, analytics capabilities, worldwide patent data sources and project delivery features integrated and simply share access rather than the data. Of course security and having complete control over who can access what within the platform and what they can see or do with the data is key to making such collaboration possible. With this in mind what emerged was a fresh yet simple approach to sharing, collaborating and even delivering patent research and IP analysis projects.

IP managers can simply create projects, set them up and grant access to co-workers or external counsels
Patent Analysts could work on projects, create views / dashboards and grant access to those that need the insights and work
Corporate organizations can set up projects and grant access to service providers asking them to add their searches and additional metadata into the platform thereby not having to worry about data formats and integration of data from word and excel files into internal workflow
Service providers can also setup projects and deliver them as real time dashboards (Patent Dashlets™) to their clients while being able to decide how they prefer to view their data based on what is relevant to them.

As it turned out this one small simple change in the approach to co-working and collaborating on patent research and IP analysis projects can make things a whole lot simpler. And that the PatSeer approach – Share the platform not the data…would offer a smarter approach to working with patent data.

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