A garden path led Enric Escorsa into his two-decade career of technology spotting. Escorsa, trained as an agricultural engineer, initially applied his skills to the area of landscape architecture. In fact, if you ever fly into Terminal 4 at Madrid-Barajas Airport, check out the green space. Escorsa was part of the team that designed the lighting, pathways, and garden areas surrounding the infrastructure and communications stations. The goal: fashioning a more palatable and workable hub. A few years into his budding career, Escorsa took those outdoor horizons and brought them indoors, so to speak, with information landscapes. “I now create gardens in my head, but with data only,” he said. “It’s not so big a career leap when you consider that it’s all about visualization.”
Escorsa is the CEO of Barcelona-based IALE Tecnología, a firm that helps clients understand the business landscapes they have to contend in. With industry analysis, numbers, naturally, are vital. And IALE’s research certainly gives the stats their due. Just as crucial in Escorsa’s view? Words, pictures, and maps. IALE takes up academic disciplines that show technology trends with layers of context, taking into account the importance and positioning of words used in scientific research and invention, for instance. This level of detail helps companies better allocate their resources as they compete in their markets.
Patent insider
Who: Enric Escorsa
Innovation cred: CEO of IALE Tecnología; former landscape architect
Favorite invention: This multilevel antenna patent from another Barcelona-based company called Fractus. The invention, granted in 2006, helped change how antennas transmitted signals in mobile devices from manually extended components to small, efficient, fractal patterns that mirror the repeating designs of nature (as in the branching configurations of trees). The technology was widely used in devices, often without compensation. In 2012, Fractus won $41 million in a patent infringement suit with Samsung. “It’s a David and Goliath patent story,” says Escorsa, who has done research for Fractus in the past.
Most promising patent: This patent, granted in 2023 to Cibo Technologies, for verification of carbon footprint on agricultural land. Cibo, founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2015 (Flagship was also the backer of Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna), offers technology to enhance and measure the outcomes of regenerative agriculture. “As an agricultural engineer, I’m interested in using natural cycles and organic materials from animals and vegetation to improve the way farms are managed and food is produced,” says Escorsa. The patent was recently cited by IBM in a method to predict risk from terrace-based agriculture.
IFI CLAIMS spoke with Escorsa over the summer to learn more about IALE’s approach to research and how the company is changing as the world turns more and more to AI for answers. He had plenty to say about AI and the commoditization of industry reports, the life cycle of competitive intelligence, patent landscapes, and why IALE uses IFI CLAIMS patent data to draw the patent picture. The interview has been edited for clarity and length:
IFI: How did you end up working with patents?
Escorsa: My background had nothing to do with patents initially. I’m an engineer—an agricultural engineer specializing in landscape architecture. I studied architecture in London and worked there as a landscape architect. After some years, I returned home to Barcelona and became involved in a European data project. Essentially, I transitioned from natural landscapes to data landscapes. One data project led to another, and before long, my focus started to coalesce around competitive intelligence and technology scouting. In 2006, I started working as an analyst with IALE, a company that my father, who was a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, co-founded with one of his colleagues there in 1998. They spun it out of the university. They were pioneers in applying competitive intelligence and scouting technologies in Spain and in Latin America. In 2003, the partners opened an office in Chile with a small team of like-minded technology researchers. At that time, this sort of intelligence was not that well known, except in a few countries, like the U.S. and France.
In the beginning, I worked on a project with a couple of corporate clients in Germany and Italy, along with some universities, that was centered around patents. We called it PATExpert. Another project I worked on was called TOPAS (Tool Platform for Intelligent Patent Analysis and Summarization). I learned programming languages such as Python and R. Those languages opened a whole new world for me of analysis using data visualization in multiple, innovative ways. Ways that were flexible, reproducible, and made patents more accessible to audiences outside of technical experts. The systems we designed automated certain information extraction methods from patents. We used early natural language and data processing tools. With time, we developed technologies to process even more patent information, and joined that with data processed from other sources, which could be used for strategic intelligence in various market sectors. These data extraction processes and the metrics we layered on top of them allowed us to derive incredibly useful information that helped companies and governments to make more informed decisions. My father retired in 2012. That’s when I became the CEO.
IFI: How does somebody make the transition from landscape architecture to data?
Escorsa: I often have to explain my change of career. But in a way, it’s related. When I started at IALE, we created mapping technologies, such as mapping with words. We were showing the description of technologies in a way that could be seen as a landscape. We developed methods of representing patent and scientific information in an approach that opened the door for a non-scientific person to see the big picture and visualize how a technology is developing. Landscapes were the link for me. I’m still architecting landscapes; it’s just that the terrain is digital and data-filled instead of an environmental background of flowers, trees, bushes, and pathways.
This data landscaping work comes from what is called scientometrics or the measuring of science. I became engrossed by how to evaluate the relevance of scientific papers and technologies. There is an area of research having to do with representing the evolution of science. We applied this knowledge to develop our own modes to showcase technology trends—and the tangential topics that are developing around these trends, along with the entities that are breaking new ground or dominating. What technologies are emerging? How can we detect a new technology before competitors see it? This is an academic discipline that has been around for decades, but we adapted it with new, digital products that help us get inside these landscapes of information.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, a point-in-time report is no longer enough. Our clients want to know what is happening on a continual basis and how it aligns with the way they work, so they can reorient and adapt.
IFI: What makes IALE unique?
Escorsa: At IALE, what we’ve been offering for a while are services related to analyzing sectors and providing insights and trends on the competitive environment—and predicting how those sectors might evolve. We evaluate markets and provide newsletters to our clients that update them on developments in a given area. We call them Bulletins or Smart Scans; they give clients a quick way to stay on top of their industry’s tech intelligence. We are still doing that, but now we are evolving and have been for the past decade by making these offerings more automated, more powerful at the technological level. Over the last five years, as AI has been maturing, we have expanded into a new type of consulting because our clients want to figure out how to integrate AI into the brain trust of their businesses. Consulting with our clients on AI helps them integrate our products and make the most of them.
Today we’re experimenting with things. We’re moving beyond just producing reports. We’re helping our clients personalize their own way of using AI, especially when it comes to their searches for the detailed information they need to run their businesses. Our intelligence dives require a high degree of human input. With AI, we are trying to customize it in a way that provides information that is more targeted and useful to the humans who use it. The AI is complementing and enriching the human insight that we are providing. It’s complicated right now, and we’re still figuring it out, but the development of this AI consulting we do is taking shape.
Currently, AI tools are making traditional reports into a commodity. But what I’m seeing of this commodity simply isn’t enough because strategic information, by definition, is not something everyone can produce. You have to feed and adjust and adapt the information with something that is specialized—something that addresses your business context or niche. Defining the right context is more important than ever for AI to work. So we are becoming a company that helps other companies personalize the way they engage with AI. There is a whole area of research about how to feed AI that has been trained with internal company data or new data that didn’t exist when the system was trained. For AI to be valuable, it has to be modified for the particular need of a specific company. That’s what sets IALE apart.
IFI: So how does that process work in the typical back and forth with a client?
Escorsa: We have clients in many different sectors: energy, agriculture, sanitation, finance and more. A client will approach us about a new line of business they want to get into, and they want to know everything about this new area. Who competes there? Who is developing new technologies? Who are the dominant players? Which companies are most open to partnership or acquisition? Whatever the goal might be, we map out this new arena so that they’re aware of important developments and emerging technologies. But in today’s fast-paced business environment, a point-in-time report is no longer enough. Our clients want to know what is happening on a continual basis and how it aligns with the way they work, so they can reorient and adapt. We need to monitor industries in a way that keeps them updated and allows them to anticipate opportunities and threats.
Some of our clients are already using some sort of AI tool that gives some insight. Or they have internal information gleaned from their operations and they want to see how it can be integrated with data on how business is behaving in their niche. Our new offerings under development will integrate many systems of intelligence so that our clients can stay on top of all of this ever-advancing technology.
Competitive intelligence is like a life cycle. At IALE, we are part of the entire cycle for our clients—the total chain of decisions that our clients need to make. Our research and consultations help them come to the best possible conclusions. There are many good software companies out there. We are one of them. And many consultancies that do specific things. But we want to be a trusted intelligence partner every step of the way.
The human expertise needed to make conclusions from patent data is still necessary because of the strategic implications that spring from the allocation of R&D monies. Companies have to take many things into account before relying heavily on AI: the company’s specialty, its own strategy, the way it goes about enforcing its IP, internal decision making, how the external market is behaving.
IFI: What trends and changes have you seen when it comes to patents?
Escorsa: At IALE, we use patents as a source of strategic information for our clients. Patents give early indications—earlier than most anything else—about technologies that are potentially valuable. This has a powerful strategic value for companies. Though a single patent can be crucial to understand, what’s truly important is taking in the entire patent landscape in a given area, which contains a lot of tactical and useful information. But the information has to be properly exploited, and the methods for developing information have changed in the past 20 years. When I started working with patents, accessing some patent databases came with much difficulty and enormous limitations in terms of coverage and quality. Now, with services like IFI, we can access so much information in a globalized and normalized way, which allows us to scale the analysis we do for our clients. We can trust that the statistics and metrics we produce from it are valid. Being able to make use of patent data that speeds our research has been an enormous change.
At the same time, the IP world is always complex. There are so many jurisdictions, and you have to be up to date with what is going on. Information is in constant flux. As a result, it’s not easy to fully understand and then communicate to the clients about how it works and the implications for their markets. When we look at data, we have to help our client understand what this data is, where it comes from, and why it’s useful to them at a strategic level. AI is a big topic right now. Some AI systems are powerful in terms of getting lots of information with a single query. But patent information is not currently included in many AI systems in a way that is useful or valid. Or in a way where the searcher can be certain of the coverage and the limitations. Patents still need to be dealt with separately, with more precision and, of course, caution. The human expertise needed to make conclusions from patent data is still necessary because of the strategic implications that spring from the allocation of R&D monies. Companies have to take many things into account before relying heavily on AI: the company’s specialty, its own strategy, the way it goes about enforcing its IP, internal decision making, how the external market is behaving. All these things need to be seen together. AI cannot sort all this right now for patents. We still need plenty of human intelligence.
IFI: Why did IALE decide to use IFI for patent data?
Escorsa: I was very lucky to be introduced to IFI through a professional who works there. Somebody I’ve known for a long time because she was a pioneer in IP data management here in Spain and is from Barcelona where we are based. For the nature of our business, we take information from many different places. We look at scientific papers, scientific information, R&D projects, news sources, market data, and of course patent data. In the past, we had to do patent searches through different providers, and then we had to integrate that data using several time-consuming techniques.
Saving time is the key reason IFI CLAIMS is so powerful for us. It allowed us to integrate data quickly for our analysis. IFI data has broad coverage of global patent authorities, and IFI’s data is normalized, which is a laborious task. Before that, any new analysis we undertook required us to gather data from various places and clean it ourselves. We had to identify applicant names, sort them and eliminate duplicates, and then identify the actual owner names of thousands of company names written in different formats. It was annoying! We’ve come to rely on IFI’s service, and it has made a big difference because we no longer have to worry about all that. We can just focus on our analysis, which is our core business.
