Core Benefits of Hybrid Patentability Searches That Optimize IP Filing Process

September 12, 2022
- Intellectual Property (IP)
- Patent Drafting & Illustrations

You have an idea, and want to patent it?

The very first step you can do is to conduct a patentability search to check whether the idea or the invention is patentable or not. The purpose of conducting the patentability search is to search for documents that disclose inventions that are identical or similar to the invention in question. There are a number of ways a patentability search can be performed.

Ways to Perform Patentability Search

Manual Patentability Search
AI- ased Patentability Search

You can manually conduct a prior art search or outsource an organization who can perform patentability search for you. It involves conventional procedure of searching prior arts by looking into the patent databases, by forming relevant queries, manually reading out each patent and then creating analogy based on the features of invention whether a result found in the patentability search is a prior art or not. This is a time-consuming task and can cost higher than the other approaches mentioned below.

In current times, AI is rapidly becoming the solution to most software and service needs found in any industry. Similar is the case with patentability searches. Today multiple AI-based tools and software are available, which can search for a plethora of patent documentation in minutes of processing time and extract out relevant patent documentation which can act as a potential prior art. This process doesn’t require a lot of time and generate results in seconds with the help of machine learning algorithms. Also, it incurs very less cost to a person who wants to perform a patentability search. However, as AI is still in its starting phase and the algorithms are not fully developed and cannot imitate the human intelligence efficiently, there are chances of error that might result in incorrect/inconclusive prior art results.

A mixture of manual and AI-based approach can solve the shortcomings of above-mentioned processes and can generate result which are more relevant and cost and time efficient too. This approach can be named as, “Hybrid Approach”

Hybrid Patentability Search

A hybrid approach can be considered to conduct patentability searches where manual effort can be integrated with the efficiency and intelligence of AI to generate cost-effective final results. While AI-based tools are cost-effective and time-efficient, manual searching is more reliable and relevant. Using both at the same time can result in truly superior results. The Hybrid process can incorporate two stages:

At the first stage, AI-based results can be extracted out by inputting the idea to the AI-based tools in the form of syntactic and semantic queries capturing the features of the invention.
At the second stage, the results from the first stage can be manually analyzed by analysts to extract out the best reliable and relevant prior arts from the results generated by the AI stage.

Core Advantages Of Hybrid Patentability Search Approach

Cost-Effective

The hybrid approach is highly cost effective as it involves a two-stage screening process. The cost which is incurred in conventional search approach due to manual analysis of a huge set of published documents is saved here as manual effort has to be spent only on the document set which is already been filtered by the AI-based tools. This saves a lot of time and cost and can save at least two-third of the cost that may have cost if conventional approaches were used in patentability searches.

Time saving

The first stage itself knock out most of the irrelevant and un-worthy prior arts from the result set which manually needs to be analyzed. Hence, it will save a lot of time that would have been spent on analyzing those the irrelevant and un-worthy prior arts.

IP cost saving

Isn’t it great to know the worthiness of your idea before filing it for a patent. The hybrid approach helps in eliminating the irrelevant and unworthy ideas in their early stages which further helps in saving cost which may incur because of office actions that may come across during the after-filing stage of getting a patent.

Better Screening

AI-based tools help screening the best results in real-time which can be further filtered out by manual analysis to get the most relevant results out of them. Hence, this approach gives better screening of the prior arts than the conventional methods.

How we Implement Hybrid Patentability Search?

At TTC, we use XLSCOUT’s NOVELTY CHECKER as a primary tool to perform Hybrid Patentability Searches.

Novelty Checker: Novelty Checker is a user supervised AI-based tool which takes inputs from the user the invention which includes the Problem Statement, Application area/Technology domain of the problem, and the invention that solves the problem in the form of few brief points covering the main aspect of the invention.

The Novelty Checker automatically parses the description of the invention into specific key features, extract key concepts and key classes which a user can further choose to as a filter to refine the search results. A user can also highlight a particular key feature on which he wants to focus the search.

 After all the manual work is done and AI-based tool has all the inputs from the user, AI based tool automatically run superior AI intelligence behind the scenes to find out the most relevant prior art results with each result mentioning a relevant text for each feature with a strength score that indicates the relevance of the relevant text with the subject invention’s key feature. This helps a lot in sorting the results while focusing on a particular key feature.

About TTC

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