explored by the public sector to take informed decisions related to prioritization and investments in R&D, IP portfolio management, commercialization of technology, and research collaborations among others.
[5] There has also been an increase in open-source software, tools[6] and datasets[7] being used for patent analytics, as well as the use of techniques, such as machine learning, for different tasks.
A freedom-to-operate search report helps organizations decide if they have the clearance to launch a new product without infringing on anyone else’s patent rights.
For users in industry, they are used as a decision-making mechanism (patent portfolio management, R&D investment and prioritisation, technology transfer, etc.).
They are costly and commissioned or developed to support specific decision-making processes and are considered business intelligence.
In the public sector, the providers of patent landscape reports are the national patent offices or research institutes that prepare reports on subjects of general interest, for a specific need, or to provide landscaping services to the public.
Patent landscape reports are used by the public sector to raise awareness, with public institutions increasingly finding ways to facilitate and validate their policy decisions in ways that are similar to private sector decisions.
Different fields of patent documents and other structured information are analyzed using statistical, analytical, and comparative methods to identify patterns, understand IP strategies and trends in technology areas in question.