Strategies for reducing risk inpatent applications'analysis

Patents are a unique and exhaustive source of technological knowledge. Technical information we can find in them is not possible to obtain in other ways, such as market and economic analysis, voice of customer, etc. Patent databases also have high accessibility (since they are free available on the web) and a high level of format uniformity. This lets patent data can be electronically searched individually or together. These special features make patents a strategic source for supporting CEOs in decision making activities. At present, worldwide patent database contains over 100 million of documents. Over the last decades, the number of patent applications per year is globally raising. The global growth in patent activity can be understood as an effect due to the shift of the economy towards the knowledge-based economy paradigm. According to this, the outcomes generated by knowledge, like patents, are business products or productive assets, which can be exploited as economical goods. In such a framework, it is crucial for patent owners knowing the value of held patents to adopt the best exploitation strategy. For whom works in the patents' environment, the main difficulty relates to the proceeding the application for patent is subjected, which generally is long and complex. The application filing is the first step in an ‘obstacle course’. Dozens of events and scenarios can affect the likelihood that the application reaches the grant, some of which might cause the unavoidable fall of the application itself. The first effect of this contest is the lack of certainties and the need to adopt work strategies and assessment criteria that take the risk into account. The surge of patent filings had drastically increased the uncertainty status of patent literature. The tools and methods currently available for patent experts are not designed to manage the risk due to this uncertain scenario. IP offices of firms, patent valuation experts of banks and other expert-in-the-field people must take the risk and manage it through their own professional expertise: a difficult job which this work addresses to. Despite the high relevance and practical consequences of the uncertainty and risk related to the procedural aspects of patent applications, only few works paid attention to them. They did not give suggestions about tools or methods able to prevent or assess the level of uncertainty in patent proceeding, neither to support the applicant carrying out patent analyses in presence of high share of patent applications. This thesis is a sort of full immersion in the uncertainty of the patent application environment. From the coarsest errors anyone might do, to suggestions about most up-to-date sources of information, tools and strategies available to limit the uncertainty risk, up to an analytical system to compute the impact of procedural events on the success likelihood of the application for patent. It is a journey into the complex world of patent seen from a non-common point of view that can give useful insight to anyone working in the field. Chapter 1 presents an overview on the currently available valuation methods for patents and the limitation they have in working with uncertainty due to patent applications. Chapter 2 is an in-depth discussion about issues related to the transformations the text of patent application may undergo during the PCT and EPC proceedings. Chapter 3 expounds a wide analysis that carried out in EP patent register to make an infographic about the success-rate of EP applications in grant and post grant proceedings. Chapter 4 gives operative indications about building a business intelligence to assess the background into which positioning a patent application. Finally, the Chapter 5 deals with the extraction of information about the market structure from patent data. In presence of patent thicket, dominant positions of main incumbent competitors might hindrance the access to the market of new entrants.