The Bigger Picture: See IP Assets As an Interactive Dependencies Map

Intellectual property management requires a holistic understanding of how your company’s inventions, the products using them, and the revenues generated by those products are connected to each other and affected by a single change in any of the associated areas.

This includes a company’s own products and external licenses it uses for those products, third party products using the company’s IP license, and the infringement detection and litigation of products using IP without permission.

Most existing IP asset management solutions and platforms can’t provide a holistic view of these connections and dependencies in the depth required, and it is up to the paralegal or even the IP lawyer to manually find and evaluate those connections and the associated information.



Rather than manually looking up potentially relevant data items and evaluating if they contribute important information to a task or question at hand, why not use a database that automates that process at scale and real-time for you?

Upgrade Your IP Asset Insight Quality

Three types of information queries do significantly enhance the IP asset insight quality:

Single items

Show every existing information that relates to a single distinct item of any kind. No lengthy and cumbersome consolidation and chasing after data not knowing whether it is complete, correct and relevant.

Multiple items

Show if and how two or more items are connected to each other, and avoid changes made to an IP asset of which it is not known that it renders a product unprotected or jeopardises existing licenses and revenues.

Causes & Effects

Show what causes an issue and what the effects of a change in the IP asset setup are, using Neo4j’s graph data science algorithms.

Simplify and Enhance IP Management

The knowledge resulting from these questions simplifies and enhances IP management significantly:

IP Filing

• Definition of filing strategies which consider global market coverages, filing and renewal costs, the first to file has advantage to defend and enforce country IP rights, timelines, and of course the optimal filing route (country specifics vs EPO process vs WIPO process).
• Better similarity evaluation against already published IP assets like patents, designs, or trademark usage.
• More effective patent claims and demonstration of innovation progress through better evaluation of claims already existing in published patents.

Licensing

• Better distinction between applicable FRAND and non-FRAND licensing terms.
• Competitive licensing fees and royalties (charge or being charged) through consideration of product, market, competition, legislation, or technology conditions.

Infringement & Litigation

• Automatic discovery of patterns with a high infringement potential.
• Comprehensive quality information coverage for litigation or IP invalidation purposes.

The automatic connection-based visualization of IP assets in relation to other IP relevant areas in an intuitive and easily understandable manner is performed by the Neo4j graph database.

The resulting information and answers can complement existing IP Asset Management (IPAM) systems either through a Neo4j-provided user interactive graph visualization tool Neo4j Bloom, the use of already existing IPAM internal capabilities, or the integration into other existing applications or IP-specific platforms.