Patent Portfolio Analysis is done to study the patents owned by a company. This company can be one’s own company or a competitor organisation. Some times the portfolio of more than one company can be benchmarked to understand the strength and weakness of portfolio. The patent portfolio analysis can also be done to locate white spaces in company’s portfolio and to find new business partners to sell or license out unused IP.
Studying patent portfolio involves conducting IP searches for not just the parent company alone but it also includes searching for sister companies including mergers, acquisitions or the likes. Signicent has access to professional corporate-tree databases to build the entire list of companies and then conduct patent searches.
Very often, the patents found in a portfolio analysis are also mapped to the product portfolio of a company. This analysis is very useful to analyse product wise patent distribution for a company and to understand how a company has been filling IP related to a product line and how its focus may be changing over time. Many other useful insights can be drawn from a portfolio analysis.