Patent Service Helps Inventors Keep Tabs on New Developments

R&D Abstracts Help Clients Stay Current and Focus R&D on Profitable Ideas

Challenge

Tracking new patents is crucial for many companies, especially in high-tech industries, where profits and reputations hinge on exploiting new markets and tapping new revenue streams. Companies also must monitor patents to identify infringements among their own ideas and those of their competitors. And if competitors are infringing on a company’s patents, legal action must be initiated quickly to protect creative rights and market share.

In the mid-1990s, one publishing company recognized that providing more detailed information on patents would fill an important niche for its customers. A first step was to create a searchable database that would allow customers to sift through the abstracts and then call up full documentation on those of special interest. Moreover, they also would deliver the information to customers directly via the Internet, PDF files, faxes or even printed newsletters.

Catering to all these special orders for information would be a labor-intensive project. Worldwide, nearly 10,000 patents – each supported with volumes of text and illustrations – are issued each year in fields such as engineering, chemical development and molecular genetics. Scanning the patents, written in dozens of languages, and then developing abstracts, indexing the information and delivering it to customers in the language and form that they requested was too large a task to be accomplished cost effectively in-house...