2020 is such a special year that we almost forgot to celebrate the 10th anniversary of IPStudies patent analytics activities… the local party is postponed to a later, post-COVID date, but we’d still like to take a look back at our first ten years of practice. Back in September 2010, patent mining and landscaping tools were still in their infancy, limited to basic quantitative counts over time and classes. Having experimented the benefit of using patent analytics data to guide R&D as well as M&A development choices in the high-tech corporate world, IPStudies’s founder, Corinne Le Buhan, envisioned the need to bring this information to Swiss technology “grown-ups” as early as possible in their product development cycle. By going beyond the extraction of austere lists of patent numbers to visually highlight their development context, it becomes much easier to benchmark and thus optimize the IP development positioning for companies exposed to highly competitive environments.
In the 2010s, this visual patent analytics practice has been made more efficient, and thus more affordable for smaller companies, thanks to dedicated patent family visualization and browsing tools. This significantly facilitated executive level reporting of complex patent benchmarking information. Fabien Palazzoli brought his dedicated experience with such tools to IPStudies in 2013, enabling a diversification of our offerings to the life sciences and biotech markets. While most of our studies are still done on a custom demand for a diversity of customers so we cannot publicly expose most of our works, we became internationally recognized for our studies and data monitoring services for the CRISPR genome editing patent landscape as early as in 2014. As of September 2020, our two biotech experts Fabien Palazzoli and Solenne Bire still routinely analyze dozens of thousands of patent claims out of around 200 new CRISPR-related patent publications every month for our customers in North America, Asia and Europe.
Moreover, along this decade, specific legal developments, both in terms of procedures and jurisprudence, at national as well as international level, have also facilitated our custom patent monitoring work and the diversity of actions made possible through our local and international networks of IP practitioners who are entitled to legally act in front of their national patent offices. We have accordingly also strengthened our local partnerships on the legal practice side to develop a full IP strategy offering for our SME customers, also around European life sciences patent development practice, for which Mira Lapray just joined our team.
For the next decade, we look forward to the development of tools facilitating a deeper strategic analysis of complex patent families, especially those making significant use of the US continuations and continuations-in-part legal tools as their “keep-it-a-moving target” IP development & licensing tactics. We look forward to discussing it further by 2030… in the meanwhile, stay tuned!