Groups and Locations

map, visualize, scientific, organize, text, intellectual, property, business, library, librarians, corporate

One of the key tools in Aureka is a text-mining module called ThemeScape. Aurigin brought this out to attract business customers by helping corporate strategists to: defend intellectual property against competitors; understand what business areas to operate in; and explore where to license out or buy-in technology. 'So IP started into the strategic marketing and financial areas of the firm, working in tandem with legal librarians, thereby making IP an integral part of the business decision process of the corporation,' says Dodd.
It helped solve the problem of how to compare, in a simple way, the portfolio of company A with that of company B, when tens of thousands of patents are involved. 'You want to be able to show to your management team, to your executive board, the lie of the landscape for intellectual property holdings. You can't do that with a search report the librarian's run,' says Dodd. 'Corporate strategists don't need to care about the details of what's in each patent, they need to see at a very macro level'. ThemeScape produces pseudo-3D maps - like those used by geographers and walkers - with contoured hills representing the patent themes identified. This sort of analysis has changed the way companies approach mergers and acquisitions. In the standard due diligence process, the intellectual property portfolio was at the tail-end of the review. Now, says Dodd: 'We see more and more companies, when they're doing acquisitions, say "take my portfolio; see how that company I'm going to acquire overlaps" or "show me my portfolio and show me all the potential candidates that I'm looking at, and show me how those portfolios overlap and which ones should I be buying", based on their IP'.
The overview provided by ThemeScape can be probed and analysed, including with other software tools, to answer more detailed questions asked by less elevated users. Having done a search on 10,000 documents, and seen a rough landscape, users may want to focus on one small subset of patents