Spring 2018 Newsletter

US patents to China are growing rapidly

Our research has found that in 2017, China was awarded 28% more US patents than in 2016. Their total of 11,240 granted patents is ten times the number of patents they were granted in 2007. That pushed the nation into the top five recipients by country for the first time, behind the US, Japan, Korea, and Germany. While patent grants to China still make up only 3.5% of the more than 320,000 awards, it’s likely this share will continue to increase.

Read our blog post to learn which companies and technologies are receiving patents.

IFI to speak at PIUG Annual Conference

We're looking forward to the Patent Information User Group (PIUG) Annual Conference taking place in Alexandria, VA next week. Our EVP of Client Services, Janice Stevenson, will be presenting “Uniting Patent Data Sources with BigQuery”. Our exploration will illustrate how details about patents may enhance the understanding of a topic for a wide range of colleagues from R&D to the general counsel’s office.

Learn more about the event, which is also PIUG's 30th anniversary!

Patent education resources

As many new uses for patent data come to light, we’re getting requests for education on patent content. Fortunately, there are several good resources for learning both basic and advanced concepts. We've compiled a list of courses that range from free, short online courses to in-depth, in-person seminars. 

View the list and let us know if you have any additional suggestions.

IFI staff shares insights on patent trends

We asked our staff to share their thoughts on trends they're seeing in the industry for World IP Day. Their reponses touched on new ways to use patent data, like applying machine learning techniques, and new technologies such as blockchain that are reliant on patents. 

“During the last 5 years we have noticed dramatic growth in the range of use cases that leverage patent data. And with each new use case there is corresponding growth in applied technologies. From traditional search to financial analytics, from text mining to cognitive tools embracing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other semantic methodologies, we see product developers making substantial contributions to the state-of-the-art addressing well-known challenges such as patent valuation, drug discovery, and competitive intelligence.”
— Mike Baycroft, CEO

Read more staff contributions in our blog post. 

Featured Partner Linguamatics provides agile, high performance text mining software, enabling rapid discovery of information from text. NLP-based mining of unstructured text—such as scientific papers, patent documents and news—provides a powerful alternative to conventional search approaches. The company’s flagship product, I2E, is available as an in-house enterprise system, a cloud service including the IFI patent content and an outsourced managed service. High-value applications for I2E include competitive intelligence analysis, patent analysis, product R&D, social media mining and sentiment analysis.
Where we'll be
	PIUG Annual Conference May 5–10 Alexandria, VA Janice Stevenson, EVP Client Services at IFI CLAIMS, will illustrate how to combine multiple sources of patent information to inform colleagues from the R&D team to legal staff.
	71st CFA Institute Annual Conference May 13–16 Hong Kong
	PATINFO 2018 June 13–15 Ilmenau, Germany