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It is often a very useful exercise to do a "patent
landscape analysis" before getting too far in any development process. This
patent landscape analysis involves looking at the patent situation in not only
the exact are where you intend to be designing but also in areas around this
area. What you hope to accomplish includes, in part, the following:
- identify the land mines
(possibly dangerous patents owned by others) early on so that you can make
sure that your design effort avoids them from the outset (instead of having
to change a design down the road at substantially more cost);
- see what your actual and potential competitors
are doing and ascertain where they are strong and weak in terms of IP
protection;
- see if there are trends
in the industry that you can use to your advantage in the design process and
anticipate where the trends are leading to both design anticipated benefits
into your products and secure IP protection to keep competitors from having
access to technology that would result from where the trends lead (i.e., set
up a picket fence of blocking patents to secure exclusivity in these areas
for you);
- identify "white space"
where little or no IP protection exists where IP could be generated that
could be very strategically valuable to you;
- learn from the patents
so that you can incorporate some of the ideas and inventions into your
design and IP (where such ideas and inventions don't infringe others'
patents); and
- identify technology
that you can buy or license that you can add to your portfolio that would be
useful to your business (often for very cheap).
This
exercise infuses the collective accumulation of patent "wisdom" (in all its
forms) into the brains of those who participate and also generates a set of
documents that allow you at a glance to see what the patent landscape is in a
particular area. The following chart shows, for the area of Powered
Widgets - Powered Sources, patents owned by you (in blue), competitors (in red)
and other parties (black), their expiration dates and how relevant they are to
your business (high relevance: **, medium relevance: * and low relevance: no
stars):
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