CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE
PATENT INFORMATION FROM CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE
A centre of excellence can not only be a great source of conference papers and printed publications, but also of expert witnesses or technical advisors with the equipment, facilities, or environment necessary to pursue pointed scientific research that may be relevant to a patent searcher. Occasionally there may be a piece of unique equipment at the site which could be used for further investigation in a patent dispute, for instance.
As an example, there is a school of mining at the University of Witwatersrand which is right next to one of the largest mountainous gold deposits in the world. Te RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science location in Kobe, Japan, is the site of the world’s most powerful supercomputer. And why would the Nevada Desert Research Center be anywhere but in the middle of the Mojave Desert?
How do these research facilities relate to patents? Outside of the centres’ researchers obtaining patents based on their work, these centres focus the talents of the individuals and research money on equipment and the pursuit of the unknown, not to mention the infrastructure to allow expensive research to be conducted using specialised equipment.
Once a centre of excellence has been found, look into its research staff by name. If the centre is affiliated with a university, then the doctoral candidates can be checked. Most important may be identifying the faculty advisor who guided the research. Checking the author of a doctoral dissertation and any papers related to the author’s advisor may find prior art that could pre-date information found in a contemporary search. Prior or future citations to the work of these scientists could be checked both for earlier publications that might be relevant and to help evaluate the worth of the study. Finally, these researchers can be a source of information as consultants since they may have more in-depth knowledge of their field and their reputations can be easily verified for use as experts.
Finding prior art information usually involves searches by subject terms or class codes and can quite often involve patent assignees and inventors as subject terms. Instead of trying to locate a corpus of relevant documents, it may be useful to find a physical centre of excellence where work is conducted and then look for publications that come out of it. Ron Kaminecki explains.
From the diagram above it is easy to see that the top countries by number of patents in the supercomputer area are the US, Japan, UK, China, France and Germany. Independent of this chart, the 11 top-performing supercomputers in the world are located in these same countries (with the minor exception of the UK). Tus, a search of supercomputing patents would be incomplete if it did not cover the publications of the facilities in these countries. Conversely, by searching the publications from these research locations, possible connections to prior art may be found.
How does one find these centres of excellence? First, conduct an in-depth search of the target subject area, and then sort the results by location (not filing authority) of the inventor or assignee. Inventor location works well as that is where the work using the human talent and the necessary equipment is done, even though some inventors may be located in different countries. Patent assignee location may stilt the results, however, if, for example, a research site is in one location and corporate headquarters are in another. Te ProQuest database, Community of Scholars, details background information on researchers, including statistics on their publication history and citations.
66 World Intellectual Property Review November/December 2011
Key to this technique is locating these centres of excellence. Tey can then be data-mined for backgrounds on publications, people and facilities in the hopes of finding patent information that may not be found via traditional methods. n
Ron Kaminecki is director of the intellectual property segment at Dialog LLC. He can be contacted at
ron.kaminecki@dialog.com
Ron Kaminecki has been involved with patents for more than 35 years, working with other patent attorneys, agents and patent examiners in the art of literature retrieval for intellectual property. He holds a BS (chemistry), an MS (computer science), a JD (with certificate in patent law), is a US patent attorney and has a patent pending.
www.worldipreview.com
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