Everyone recognizes that there has been a tremendous increase in patent applications and patent granted over the recent years. For instance, for the sole field of environmental technologies, the number of patent applications has tripled between 1985 and 1995.

It is also well known that patents are a good trend indicator in the development of science and technology.

Continuous - monthly - monitoring and in-depth analysis of the content of patents and patent applications brings valuable knowledge and appears more and more as a strategic information source absolutely unmatched when it comes to assessing the competitiveness of a firm.

• Different reports have indicated that up to 30 % of the costs in the fields of R&D could be saved by such systematic monitoring and « educated » evaluation of the patent literature.
  
• Furthermore, 85 to 90 % of the technical knowledge is indeed retrievable in this corpus of knowledge i.e. the patent literature. This represents an updated and detailed source of technical information unmatched by technical journals or magazines or books or even internet publications.

It is, however, not obvious to retrieve the right information for the non experienced observer !!!

This specialized, focused, « educated » patent search and advisory service offered by IXAS Conseil is the link between this vast amount of patent data to be considered as knowledge base or data mine and your market penetration / growth strategy and interests.

The following investigations are conducted by IXAS Conseil experts:

• keyword searches, starting with so-called search trees visualizing different search and questioning strategies and approaches which allow highly needed cross checking.
• searches by patent classes,
• searches by company name, making sure that competitors are fully tracked in respect to such patent activities.
• searches in adjacent domains, for instance when a product is associated with other products, again in a drive for completeness of information retrieval.

Yet, it is more and more necessary to monitor the entire market access chain, as such patent activity can be conducted by all players, would it be the raw material suppliers, the first level converters or the end-users, as globalization and concentration favor such drive for dominance. IXAS Conseil has the large industry understanding to support such educated information search, retrieval and analysis in a large number of domains.

Market leadership through targeted focused patent information retrieval and management :

It is well known that, in view of the magnitude and pertinence of the information contained in recently published patents from around the world, patent departments of particularly large companies do conduct such investigations regularly.

They carry out systematic patent search and in-depth analysis to keep track of developments in a particular area of technology or to maintain full awareness of the patenting activities of competitors. The benefits of such offered investigations cover three domains :

• State-of-the-art reviews :
  
  Early detection to keep track of developments in technologies and in technological changes; control and effective use of own resources, avoiding costly duplication of effort in research and development of ideas which have already been tried, and concentration on most promising research tasks.
  
  
• Information about the status of industrial property rights :
  
  Scanning the progress of patent applications filed by companies in different countries; name and family searches and patent watch in order to detect infringements of existing or imminent property rights.
  
  
• Marketing strategy information :
  
  This type of search and analysis leads to a better understanding of what types of products are in, or about to enter the market ; it gives insights concerning what new products / markets competitors are developing; it helps classifying the client’s company own position with respect to other competitors; it maintains current awareness and, if necessary, leads to the prevention of external industrial property rights. It also allows not only monitoring of competitors, but also monitoring of key accounts, possibly orienting sales penetration efforts toward those innovative customers which could block development of other less innovative one or to develop application patent at the raw material manufacturing level and operate via licensing.
  
  This is particularly important with “application” patents which, being “close to market”, can block the access to manufacturers and consequently to producers, suppliers to other manufacturers;

This global intelligence service is organized around the identification and analysis of information from different sources but more preferably extracted from the on-line accessible international patent data bases. The ouput is a clear monthly summary report covering your areas of interest.

In addition to the information services mentioned above, IXAS Conseil patent search and advisory service carries out in-depth analysis of the search results in order to determine right of practice.

This is conducted in situations such as the launch of a new process or production plant, the launch of a new product, and may lead to supporting the client in domains such as contractual agreements which may include negotiation of indemnification agreement with demanding end-users eager to secure their own positions in cases of infringement.

There is no doubt, in IXAS Conseil's mind, that there is a strong need to develop much greater awareness of third-party art and patented technology, in the field of competence of industrial firms, whatever their size.

It will enable to uncover parallel approaches to producing products and processes,

It will yield a much mower product / patent risk profile, that is securing broadest patent coverage for products to be successfully developed for markets.