Introduction
Finding valuable patents is essential for making smart IP decisions, whether it’s about managing your portfolio or keeping an eye on competitors. Traditional patent search methods are slow and tedious, forcing IP professionals to sift through thousands of documents manually—a process that can take days and requires close attention to detail.
With the “Interesting Patents” in Slate, this has changed. IP professionals can now directly jump to potentially valuable patents, it’s like finding the needle in a haystack using a giant magnet, instantly. In this article, we’ll explore how you can use Slate to supercharge your search for valuable patents with ease.
How Slate Helps You Achieve Your Objectives
With Slate, you can achieve key IP objectives simply and effectively:
- Finding Collaboration Opportunities: Slate helps you spot patents developed with other companies, pointing to valuable partnerships. These collaborations can signal new technology trends and potential partners who could add strength to your innovations.
- Building a Strong Competitive Position with Blocking Patents: Slate identifies patents that block competitors, allowing you to defend your position. By holding patents that control critical technologies, you can limit competitors’ entry into important areas, giving your company a secure advantage.
- Focusing on Patents with Large Family Sizes: Slate highlights patents filed in multiple countries, showing where there’s strong market interest. Patents with large families often align with future products and valuable markets, helping you prioritize areas with the highest potential.
- Optimizing and Growing Your Patent Portfolio: Slate makes it easy to manage your portfolio, focusing on patents with growth potential. This includes:
- Identifying Core and Emerging Technologies: Stay aware of technologies that matter most and track trends in new areas.
- Pruning Low-Value Patents: Keep your portfolio streamlined by identifying and removing patents with low impact.
- Leveraging Key Patents for Licensing: Generate revenue by licensing high-value patents, making the most of your IP assets.
Slate’s “Interesting Patents” feature provides quick, clear insights that support informed, faster decision-making, helping you make the best use of your IP strategy.
How to Extract Interesting Patents?
With the “Interesting Patents”, users can upload a patent portfolio—whether their own or a competitor’s—and, with one click, receive a categorized view of potentially valuable patents based on specific key nodes. These nodes represent essential categories that highlight patents with strategic value, such as:
- Collaboration: When Patents filed in collaboration with companies show strategic partnerships where different organizations combine their resources, skills, and technologies to innovate.
Example – The publication US20230180624A1, titled “Magnetic Tunnel Junction Including Hexagonal Multi-Layered Structure,” was collaboratively developed by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and International Business Machines Corp. This joint effort combines Samsung’s expertise in electronics manufacturing with IBM’s advanced research capabilities, leading to innovations in magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs).
- Acquisition: When companies acquire patents, it shows they want to protect their ideas, strengthen their intellectual property, and stay competitive. This supports their growth, encourages new ideas, and improves their position in the market.
Example – The publication US20230369535A1 was originally developed by InnovateTech Solutions. In 2023, TechWave Inc. acquired InnovateTech Solutions, including its intellectual property portfolio. This acquisition provided TechWave Inc. with advanced technologies to improve wireless communication efficiency, strengthening its market position and technological capabilities.
- Blocking: Blocking patents can be useful and interesting as they provide a strategic advantage in the competitive landscape of technology and innovation.
Example – The publication US20220328511A1 blocking the Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., also known as Foxconn, is a leading contract electronics manufacturer.
- Family Size: A patent with a large family size, such as US20230317552A1, indicates that the invention is protected across multiple jurisdictions. This broadens the potential customer base and revenue streams for the patent holder.
- Grant Time: This includes patents that are granted and published in a very short time. These patents are interesting because they enable companies and inventors to bring their innovations to the market more quickly.
A patent like US11776879B1 was granted on October 3, 2023, just five months after its filing.
This eliminates the need for time-consuming manual filtering, as it quickly organizes patents according to these criteria and delivers the most relevant results in just a few hours, as shown below.
Conclusion
The “Interesting Patents” feature transforms your patent research by quickly categorizing potentially valuable patents based on strategic insights. This feature simplifies your workflow, making it faster and easier to spot critical patents in both your portfolio and competitor portfolios—whether they’re collaboration patents, blocking patents, or emerging technology trends. By saving your time and delivering actionable insights, Interesting Patents empowers IP professionals to make smarter decisions faster.
