Call for Government to provide patent tools

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 1, 2006

Cambridge technology company urges Government to provide UK technology SMEs with tools that will help them further protect new ideas and find the right areas for innovation.

Scientific Generics has urged the Government to provide UK technology SMEs with tools that will help them further protect new ideas and find the right areas for innovation.

If the proposals are adopted, UK companies could increase the success rates in UK technology innovation.

The evidence-led review into the UK's intellectual property (IP) framework has sparked widespread debate and looks at both the instruments (patents, copyright, designs and so on) provided by Government to protect creative endeavour, and how IP is awarded, how it is licensed in the market and how it is enforced.

Scientific Generics creates products for global clients and creates technology ventures from its campus in Cambridge, UK.

The proposal submitted to the review is based on the company's own experience of using IP, such as patents, to make money from technology innovation.

The proposal highlights software methods that can be used for analysing the millions of patents on every conceivable technology that are active around the world.

While patents are potentially a rich source of technological data, their sheer abundance can make this valuable information hard to extract.

Many difficulties faced by the smaller innovative company stem from the ever-increasing volume of patents.

In 2000 some 826,572 patents were filed, and although growth halted during the high-tech recession, this is now changing and more than one million fresh patents are likely to be filed in 2006.

SMEs lacking in-house patent specialists struggle to get a clear view of what is already protected in the area in which they operate and find it difficult to identify pertinent and useful information from patent databases, making it difficult to patent ideas and innovations.

There are many SMEs in the UK producing new inventions and technologies that need patents to survive.

Scientific Generics proposes that Government policy should support the provision of access to patent analysis tools to enable UK inventors in smaller firms to extract valuable information from patent databases and increase their patent protection (and therefore value of their IP) by helping them identify and target areas for innovation in the competitive patent landscape.

Mick McLean, Head of Economics and Public Policy at Scientific Generics, said: "In our experience the patent system does not serve the smaller innovative company well".

"Recent academic surveys confirm that patent protection is often of little importance for innovation in small UK firms".

"Enabling them to analyse patents could help SMEs make sense of the world's intellectual property - both to protect their own ideas and to find out what other patents exist on their particular technologies".

Scientific Generics has been using patent mapping expertise for a number of years.

Its methods present complex information about patents in the form of a coloured map that highlights strengths and weaknesses, hotspots of activity and trends over time.

Patent analysis was a key input to last year's report by the UK Stem Cell Initiative, and more recent analyses in biomedical science and in photonics and electronics have been commissioned as part of the DTI's Technology Programme to be launched next week.

McLean said: "Our submission to the review suggests practical ways in which the system could be improved to help small firms make better use of patents based on our own experiences".

"The IP framework must balance the need to encourage firms and individuals to innovate and invest in new ideas and creative works, with the need to ensure that markets remain competitive and that future innovation is not impeded".

"We believe that, while the patent system gets this balance right in principle, there are a variety of practical issues with the existing system especially as it affects the smaller company - so we have suggested some simple ways in which new methods of analysis can help this and aid an increase in the success rate of technology innovation in the UK".