IPStudies 10th year anniversary

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.

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What does the new patent box tax regime mean for your IP (and R&D) strategy?

Switzerland is preparing a major corporate tax law change to comply with the new OECD international tax practice recommendations (BEPS Action 5) [Update: Swiss Parliament voted the new law in June 2016 , but finally the law was not accepted by the Swiss citizens consulted by referendum in February 2017. A new tax reform in currently back in the legislative agenda, which will take a few more years. The content of this article is therefore obsolete.]

The former tax rulings regimes which were quite opaque and only accessible to multinationals will be abandoned in favour of a more transparent system, that will be more beneficial to local SMEs and corporations with active R&D in Switzerland, in particular through a couple of measures:

  1. A Swiss patent box, for optimising tax on benefits which can be bound to certain qualifying IP, such as patents and equivalent rights if substantial activities, i.e. local R&D expenditures, are effectively carried out by the taxpayer (here, Switzerland is aligning to the OECD rules, incl. the NEXUS ratio)
  2. R&D investment deduction incentives, for optimising R&D investments and thus encouraging innovation.

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IP management practices – How early inventor collaboration can help faster granting at USPTO

 

In the CRISPR-CAS patent landscape, the file history of US patent 8’697’359 by Dr. Feng Zhang from the Broad Institute highlights how a “get this one granted fast” IP strategy can be enforced in IP management practice with a strong collaboration from the inventors, at least in the USPTO prosecution, and especially in a research field where a large part of the prior art is academic.

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IPStudies launches independent patent orienteering surveys

In addition to our exclusive customer services, we now offer a selection of independent patent orienteering™ surveys on emerging breakthrough technologies, identified from our research network, searched in professional patent databases and carefully analyzed by our PhD experts.

Our patent studies are designed to help R&D, IP and business development managers identify and visualize key patent information around a given technology, to support strategic decisions by highlighting the right information out of the patent big data.

Each patent orienteering™ survey includes:

  • an analysis of the patent landscape, covering hundreds of published patent families, worldwide, in a given technology area;
  • a synthesis of IP strategy findings, to visualize key trends in terms of patent applicants, collaboration networks, competitor technology positioning, key inventors and R&D white spaces out of the landscape;
  • an on-line access to the selected patent set, so you can visualize, navigate, focus and extract the most relevant patent data according to your specific needs.

To learn more and check available surveys, visit our patent studies page.

New IP management training in Paris, June 2014

Corinne Le Buhan will be teaching the new IEEPI IP management training “From IP strategy to IP operations” in Paris on June 13th, 2014: learn about practical IP strategies and key IP management challenges from various business environments, how to define your own organisation IP strategy and how to implement it in practice with various IP development, enforcement and commercialisation tactics. In this professional training, emphasis is put on simple management tools and checklists, illustrated with case studies from various industries, and a situational workshop experimentation.

This training will also be proposed in Bern on November 7th, 2014.