Easy, Specific Business Intelligence from PatentData

If you have a relatively small patent portfolio -- say, not more than 20 patent families -- then monitoring your patents' "forward citations" is straightforward and a great source of business intelligence. It tells you who is filing new patents that are similar to your patents. This post discusses how that information can be useful, but first...

What is a patent forward citation?

The first thing to keep in mind is that the patent office continually receives new patent applications. Part of its job is, for each new patent application, to identify and publicly cite any earlier patent application which seems relevant. As a result, the new patent application and the earlier application are publicly linked by a citation.

So, what we're talking about in this post is identifying and studying the citing patents that are linked to your own patents by a forward citation. That is, the ones that came later and were believed to be similar to your patents.

How do you monitor patent forward citations?

You can do it entirely manually, but still relatively easily, for free. Just enter your patent's publication number into a patent search tool like Google Patents or Espacenet, and it will show you a list of citing patents, as well as who owns the citing patents and when they were submitted to the patent office.

You can automate the process by setting up forward citation alerts in a commercial patent searching tool. That's what I do. There's even a freemium website (in Beta at the time of writing) dedicated to monitoring forward citations: https://www.forwardcitations.com.

So, obtaining lists of citing documents is quick and easy, but...

There are no short-cuts for obtaining useful insights

You may learn from monitoring your forward citations that NewCo has filed a number of citing patents. On its own, that's an interesting piece of information. But to understand whether this represents a risk or an opportunity, (or neither,) you'll need to roll up your sleeves and read the citing patents to learn what NewCo has invented.

There's a chance that after reading the citing patents, you feel you can dismiss them because they're just not relevant.

That said, I'm going to cover some things that I look out for when I'm reading citing patents.

New use cases for your invention

Is the citing patent proposing to use your patented invention in a new way?

By way of simple example, imagine you invented the LED light bulb and patented it. Then you learn through monitoring the patent's forward citations that an automotive company is patenting an improved car headlight using a set of LED light bulbs.

Improvements to your invention

Is the citing patent proposing an improvement to your patented invention? Is its owner a competitor that is patenting a directly competitive product/service that is better than yours?

Sticking with the LED light bulb example, you may learn through monitoring forward citations that a competitor made an invention, perhaps a new manufacturing process, that makes their LED lightbulbs more efficient (lumens per watt) than yours.

Alternatives to your invention

Is the citing patent proposing a different solution to the same problem that is addressed in your patent?

Again the lightbulb example... you may learn that a competitor has invented a new incandescent lightbulb which can nearly match an LED lightbulb in terms of efficiency but is much cheaper to make.

In conclusion

Forward citations are pointers to relevant documents. If you have a relatively small portfolio of patents, my view is that you should systematically monitor the forward citations for all of them, either through automation or through a periodic manual check. The citing documents will be timely*, relevant, and manageable.

*Although there's usually a lag because patents remain confidential for the first 18 months unless early publication is requested.