How to leverage blocking patents to get the most out of R&D

Intelligence today is about using the collective knowledge of the organisation to reach an advantageous position in industry.

– Stevan Dedijer

Steve Jobs’s strategy was ‘innovate your way to success’ – with this in mind, he gave us iPods, iPhones and iPads. In a similar vein, Amazon, which started by selling books online, has grown to sell almost everything in consumer electronics, books, digital content and retail goods, among many other things, not to mention becoming a top player in cloud computing and streaming. Uber needs no introduction – the unicorn start-up is now a household name. The ease and simplicity of ordering a car in conjunction with its product and business model innovation has led the company to a market capitalisation of roughly $49 billion.

The bottom line is that innovation is the only way that a company can become successful and remain so. Nowadays, it is a collaborative process – an innovator, be it an organisation, person or team, can no longer be self-reliant. It has to tap into knowledge between different entities and sectors.

Data from patent monitoring and qualitative and quantitative analysis is a vital contributor to this knowledge and is being increasingly used by companies in which growth is driven by technological factors and capabilities. In fact, this process of analysis has become an indispensable tool for many innovative organisations to evaluate their technology progress or their involvement in tech development.

The question is, what kind of patent analysis other than the traditional approaches gives R&D-specific data? A patent set should be limited to a particular technology, assignee or timeline, all of which contribute to providing useful information.

With this in mind, can there be innovation in patent analysis as there is in tech development? The answer is definitely yes.

Blocking patents

A blocking patent is a patent cited by examiners during the examination phase, which blocks the grant of or challenge the patent under examination. Examining blocking patents is an unconventional yet innovative approach, which can provide mission-critical, actionable inputs for an R&D team and open innovation managers. If a company’s patents are blocking those of a competitor, it can see where the latter is trying to innovate. If a patent blocks those of a big player from outside its industry, this might be an indication of an upcoming threat. Similar inferences could be drawn for cases where patents are blocked by competitors or other industry giants.

Tables 1 and 2 showcase how the strategy of examining blocking patent sets can help research teams and open innovation managers in R&D.
 

Table 1: How blocking patents can deliver valuable understanding to R&D teams

Analogous to in-house R&D, insight from blocking patents can enhance open innovation processes as well.

Table 2: How blocking patents can deliver valuable information to open innovation managers

Comment

Patent analysis allows companies to understand what is coming in the next four to five years and avoids duplicate R&D effort. Examining blocking patents is critical as it gives a company direction based on what competitors are doing. The process of technology transfer and collaboration is simplified when the right targets are identified through patent data mining.