Patent Strategy Research Articles

PATENTS AND THEIR SECURITY ISSUES USING BLOCK CHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Blockchain technology is a recent development in the Internet world that has impacted a variety of industries. In a distributed system, data and transactions can be shared securely using point-to-point connections.The purpose of this study is to conduct research on how a person or organization may develop a patent strategy to safeguard patent rights and how patent data is protected using blockchain technology. The suggested blockchain-based patent data protection solutions offer improved data security, data strategy and performance enhancements. This paper discusses some well-known patent technologies to emphasize the need of protecting an idea or invention. As technology advances daily via the advancement of gadgets, it is more necessary to protect an original concept by filing a patent.

디지털 플랫폼 기업의 기술 역량 다각화에 관한 연구

In the era of digital transformation, digital platform companies that started as start-ups or in-house ventures have a huge influence in various fields of our economy and life today. Their rapid growth is due not only to exogenous factors such as the development of IT technology and infrastructure, but also to the combination of their active technological innovation and diversification strategy. However, research on patent development trends of Korea's representative digital platform companies has received relatively little attention. In particular, since the 2010s, when digital transformation began in earnest, their patent trends are very important in that they show the direction and strategy of exploratory activities, but the reality is that there is still a lack of research from an integrated perspective on these areas. Therefore, this study aims to broaden the understanding of the patent strategy of digital platform companies by analyzing the patent development trends of Naver, LINE, Baemin, Kakao, Coupang, and Toss, which are representative digital platform companies in Korea. To achieve this, this study conducted text-based analysis of the patent data filed by each company. Specifically, Word Cloud analysis and Text Similarity analysis were performed to identify the key technological directions pursued by each company and analyze any similarities in their technological strategies. As a result, in the case of companies that had not yet implemented diversification, the direction of new diversification strategies could be examined through keyword analysis of filed patents. Matured companies with diversification showed a high level of similarity in patent information compared to other companies. As a result of analyzing patent information filed after 2015 compared to the entire period, it was confirmed that all companies have increased mutual similarity, suggesting that in the future, an intersection will be formed in the businesses pursued by all companies, and competition may intensify. It was confirmed that the establishment of a new strategy was required.

Answering a challenging question: is the SPC Regulation still fit for purpose in a changed pharmaceutical industry?

Building on a technology-centric framework, this book questions whether the system of supplementary protection certificates (SPC) for medicinal products established in Europe in the 1990s is still fit for purpose in light of the current pharmaceutical innovation landscape. After comprehensively setting the stage by describing the legal and economic environment surrounding the pharmaceutical market, the book rapidly dives into in-depth analysis of regulatory texts and case law, establishing itself as a key reference for practitioners, scholars, judges and legislators in life sciences. Traditionally, the pharmaceutical industry was focused on patenting small-molecule medicines. Over the last decades, the industry has pivoted towards biotechnological medicinal innovation and is increasingly securing secondary patents for new indications, formulations, dosages and so forth. The SPC Regulation was built to serve the former model. The book aims to assess whether these technological developments and go-to-market patenting strategies challenge the nearly unchanged SPC system. The main output of the book is a systematic and well-balanced disentanglement of the case law surrounding the SPC Regulation, which lays out the evolution and inconsistency of the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union and their application to biotechnological medicinal products and secondary innovation. This technical differentiation benefits greatly from the scientific expertise of the book’s author and her ability to dissect said subject matter with ease and precision. The incorporation of historical materials, opinions by advocate generals, national judgments and summary tables augments the strength of the author’s arguments.

Pharmaceutical market of the Republic of Belarus and intellectual property

The article considers the trends in the development of the drug market in the Republic of Belarus. It shows the role of the holding «Belpharmprom» enterprises in the production of medicines. The analysis of the patent-licensing situation in the pharmaceutical industry is carried out. A relationship has been established between the number of created original medicines and the number of patents for inventions received on them. Based on the analysis of state policy in pharmaceutical activities, a conclusion was made about the reorientation of enterprises to the production of generics. It was revealed that foreign drug manufacturers use two patent strategies in Belarus: they provide legal protection for their products and block the Belarusian pharmaceutical market mainly using the Eurasian Patent Convention.

Angel or devil? a study of the threshold effect of patent strategy on the relationship between patent thicket and corporate market value

ABSTRACT Patent strategies are an effective means of mitigating the negative effects of patent thickets on corporate market value. In reality, however, inappropriate patent strategies tend to exacerbate the negative effects of patent thickets. In this study, we used 2009–2019 panel data of 419 Chinese electronic equipment manufacturing companies, applied a panel threshold model, and analysed the influence mechanism. We empirically investigated the boundary dividing patent application, patent withdrawal, patent portfolio, and patent maintenance strategies from ‘angel’ to ‘devil’ and the influence mechanism of patent thickets on corporate market value. This study arrives at several conclusions. (i) Patent thickets exert a negative effect on corporate market value. (ii) Patent application and withdrawal strategies play a fully mediating role in the negative effect of patent thickets on corporate market value, while patent portfolio and maintenance strategies play a partially mediating role. (iii) Patent application, withdrawal, and maintenance strategies exhibit a double threshold effect, while patent portfolio plays a single threshold role. This study enriches the research on patent thickets.

A new method of patent analysis to support prospective life cycle assessment of eco-design solutions

Prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) was introduced with the goal to evaluate the environmental sustainability of eco-design solutions (i.e., ideas, prototypes, immature products, emerging technologies) prospectively rather than existing products, at the present time, as in traditional LCA. The main difference lies in the inventory, which is foreground and is based solely on the extraction of data from prospective documents, including patents, although this task, is tricky and can make the final result uncertain. This study proposes a systematic method to collect all the flows about a specific function of the product lifecycle from patent literature for building the foreground inventory of prospective LCA, ensuring comparability, data quality and scale-up. This was done by studying the intersections between patent analysis techniques and LCA requirements for reducing the uncertainty, prescribed by ISO 14040, ISO 14044, Pedigree Matrix and Data Quality Indicators for Life Cycle Inventory Data. The application of the proposed method to a case study related to the production of titanium powders using an innovative process revealed its main advantages in collecting patents and extracting data. Patent search recall and precision are increased. Patents are filtered by seeking a trade-off to ensure time consistency and avoid anomalous fluctuations in the data resulting from predatory patenting strategies. Data reliability and significance are controlled. Results can be expressed without levelling them around the average value, but adding time evolution and forecasting considerations. For example, the global warming potential (GWP) of the innovative process is 1.5 % lower than the GWP of the current process, considering the average patent data of the last 10 years. In addition, this value showed a 1 % increase for each year.

Technological competition and patent strategy: Protecting innovation, preempting rivals and defending the freedom to operate

Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we examine the effect of technological competition over a patent on the firm's choice of patenting strategy. We claim that technological competition makes the traditional strategy of protecting focal innovations from imitation less likely and increases the likelihood of a play strategy — i.e. using patents to avoid the risk of hold-up by other patent owners, or as a bargaining chip in litigation and cross-licensing. However, we claim also that technological competition over a target close to the firm's core technology should lead to use of a fence strategy i.e. to blocking the commercial endeavors of rivals and preempting substitute inventions. We find support for our hypotheses using data from a large-scale survey of European patent applications.

395 Hindering Generic Antiretroviral Treatment Competition for Human Immunodeficiency Virus: Anti-Competitive Agreements and HIV Disease Management Concerns

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: To understand the implications of minimal HIV generic drug availability on long-term HIV disease management, including anti-competitive agreements and patent strategies that hinder (ART) competition and ART medication safety and efficacy improvement. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Individuals living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) require sustained ART treatment. Despite excessive ART costs, the treatments use active ingredients known to be toxic, causing bone and renal impairments. A review of pharmaceutical legal cases examined the role of strategic patenting–product hopping–and anti-competitive agreements, which prevent generic competition and contribute to minimal ART improvement. A literature review explored the long-term safety effects of ART medications on HIV patients and disease management. A cost analysis of HIV disease management assessed the implications of using treatments with known toxins and their contribution to comorbidities and their effect on the cost of overall HIV disease management. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Ongoing lawsuits of major ART medication manufacturers demonstrate the intentional agreements made to hinder generic competition, which is an inherently anti-competitive strategy. Thus, prices for ART medications remained high, causing treatment costs to be a significant barrier to treatment access. Further, the entry of a new ART, Tenofovir Alafenamide Fumarate (TAF), was delayed despite knowing the key active ingredient in Tenofovir Disoproxil Fumarate (TDF) was toxic to patients long-term. As a result, patients were more likely to experience comorbidities, significantly increasing the cost of HIV care. The average cost of HIV care without comorbidities is $30,312. However, HIV care is $46,000 for two comorbidities and about $219,000 for people with 11 or more. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Abuse of patent rights prevents more effective HIV medication and generic option development. Thus, HIV disease management is inhibited. The only method of HIV disease management is patient adherence to ARTs. Patients taking less effective medications increase the development of comorbidities from toxic treatments, magnifying the cost of HIV care.

Import Competition, Destinations, and Firms’ Patent Strategies

Import Competition, Destinations, and Firms’ Patent Strategies

Product Companies Must Shift Patent Strategy as Inventions Go Digital

Overview: As traditional product companies move to offer digital products and services, they need new patent strategies. A shift to include both freedom-to-operate and freedom-of-action IP strategies will enable them to cost-effectively create a competitively advantaged position for both their core hardware and new digital/software business lines.

Anticompetitive Patent Strategies by Pharmaceutical Companies

Anticompetitive Patent Strategies by Pharmaceutical Companies

Potential Errors and Corrections in Early Phase Drug Development

Many foreign and small companies trying to enter the United States biopharmaceutical market make avoidable errors in their early clinical phase drug development and clinical trials. They need to first understand the risks that they must endure with patent law, regulatory hurdles, the complexity and duration of the necessary clinical trials, and the large cost of drug development, which often necessitates raising substantial capital from investors. If appropriate capital for these clinical studies must be raised, then the company must be able to clearly articulate a realistic expected return on investment to these individuals. So, they must also understand the market, its exclusivity, and the competition. This must all be put together in a sleek pitch deck. Early errors frequently begin with too few, inadequate, or poorly constructed patents. These and other risks and errors may be prevented by the use of an experienced product development team. Many of these errors could be avoided if companies used more experienced drug development professionals to assist them in selecting the optimum patent strategy, regulatory plan, budget, contract research organization (CRO), clinical investigators, and etc. It is hoped that this opinion piece will help make early clinical trials more effective and save time and money.

MOTIVES TO PATENT: EVIDENCE FROM ARGENTINE MANUFACTURING FIRMS

According to the literature on appropriation, firms patent mainly to prevent copy. However, given that innovation and patents form part of firms’ broader competitive strategies, patenting can include many other objectives such as blocking, increasing prestige and improving bargaining power, among others. The evidence about this kind of strategic and competitive use of patents is extensive for developed countries but almost null for developing countries. This paper aims to contribute to filling this gap in two ways: firstly, by analysing Argentine firms’ motivations for patenting and, secondly, by exploring the determinants of such motivations. The data used comes from the most recent Argentine innovation survey (ENDEI II), which provides information on around 300 manufacturing firms that applied for patents between 2014 and 2016. The findings show that Argentine firms follow one of two composite patenting strategies, the most common one being guided by objectives related to protection, including different types of blocking, and the other being guided by the less technological goals identified by the literature on strategic patenting, such as prestige, bargaining and licences.

An institutional view on the leverage of external patent law expertise and patenting performance: Insights from China

Drawing on the institutional setting in China, this study examines how firms seek legal resources and their effects on patenting performance in a weak and transitional intellectual property regime. We illustrate that due to weak protection of intellectual property rights in China, firms rely on external legal resources, which are found to be positively related to patenting performance in terms of the capability of external patent law expertise, but negatively related in terms of knowledge diversity. The marginal effect of the level of external patent law expertise on patenting performance is positive when research and development (R&D) investment is low and negative when it is high, illustrating the negative interaction between R&D investment and the level of external patent law expertise. Furthermore, institutional pressure and support moderate the effect of the level of external patent law expertise on patenting performance. This study advances the understanding of the impact of patent institutions on patent strategies in transition economies and provides novel implications for policy and patent management.

Investigating the Impacts of Misspellings in Patent Search by Combining Natural Language Tools and Rule-Based Approaches

Among all sources of technical information, patent information is one of the richest and most comprehensive. Knowing how to search in this mass of documents is becoming increasingly crucial. However, many users have limited knowledge of patents and search strategies, so they must use intuitive, often approximate approaches that can lead to highly inaccurate searches and be time-consuming. To address this problem, there are tools that help expand queries to increase recall so as not to miss good documents, however, it remains an open problem dealing with misspellings-based strategies. Typically, the problem of the presence of misspellings in patent text is underestimated even by experts in the field, and there is no specific functionality to handle it in the tools available, both free and paid. The goal of the article is to raise awareness about the difficulties in making a proper patent strategy that also takes into account the possible presence of misspellings. It is important to know where we expect to find them and how much these may affect the final result. In particular, it is chosen to divide misspellings into categories, distinguishing between misspellings associated with a generic keyword or multiword from misspellings in acronyms, chemical formulas, names of applicants, inventors, or names of specific formulas or theorems. At least one example case is given for each category, showing when and how it may affect the result. Finally, an integrated approach combining word and contextual embedding models based on deep learning with a rule-based algorithm based on wild cards and truncation operators is suggested for correcting the query, automatically suggesting the most consistent misspellings, thus achieving a more accurate and reliable result.

Use of Patent Information to Characterize Trends in the Therapeutic Applications of Extracellular Vesicles Derived from Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSC-EVs).

Extracellular vesicles derived from mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC-EVs) are gaining interest for medical purposes. The promising therapeutic effects exhibited in both preclinical and clinical studies have suggested that they may become an alternative for certain applications to cell-based therapies, which are subjected to stricter regulations. The commercial exploitation of these candidates requires a proper patent strategy from both the industry and public research organizations. Here, we performed a global patent literature analysis to identify key players and therapeutic applications in the field. Our results showed an increasing rate of patent publications since 2009, with Asia (specifically China) leading the patenting activity. The therapeutic use of MSC-EVs within patent literature covers a wide range of diseases, in which "Dermal and Wounds," "Neurology" and "Cardiovascular" are the main therapeutic areas. Moreover, most of these patents include "productby- process" claims, since the therapeutic effects of MSC-EVs could be influenced by their manufacturing process. Our results followed scientific and clinical literature trends.

Innovation, Technology, Knowledge Sharing in Agribusiness

International transfer of knowledge is a significant currency in IB. However, the ethical and legal issues that surround the grey area of innovation, technology, and knowledge sharing is seldom addressed in a systemic manner. Using Boisot’s Information Space model in knowledge management, literature review and semi-structured interview with field experts, we constructed a theoretical framework that captures the dynamics of data treatment (exploitation/exclusion), data value (high/ low) and data flow characteristics (undiffused/ highly diffused) of knowledge sharing in a global industry - Agribusiness. Four legal cases are employed to illustrate the respective quadrants’ characteristics. Building on this fundamental framework, further elements and characteristics in knowledge sharing are captured using professional imaginaries and selected dimensions of the technology acceptance model. The resultant framework is useful for management of innovation, data valuation, patenting strategy, knowledge sharing, and further research into technology adoption and knowledge sharing in both agribusiness and other global industries.

Open knowledge disclosure and technical standard competition in transition economies: A legitimacy perspective

An increasing number of profit-oriented firms are disclosing their technological achievements free of charge, but existing literature has not studied the motivation of this behaviour in depth. Based on the data of Chinese ICT (information and communication technology) listed companies, this article studies the relationship between open knowledge disclosure and technical standard competition in transition economies from a legitimacy perspective. The empirical results show that open knowledge disclosure strategies can effectively enhance firms’ influence on technical standards, and their effect is significantly better than that of patent strategies. In addition, private firms, firms with a low social responsibility level, and firms with a large market share can better take advantage of this strategy.

Patent disclosure strategies of companies participating in standard setting: Based on government regulation perspective

The patent entry standard raises the technical level, but it also sparked discussion on patent strategic. This paper constructs an evolutionary game model by introducing a supervisory mechanism and conducts simulations to study patent strategy of enterprises participating in standard setting. Moreover, empirical is used to test opportunistic motive. This paper finds that pre‐regulation and post‐punishment have key effect on the equilibrium. With the strengthening of supervision, the system tends to converge on the results of prior disclosure. Companies participating in national standard setting have opportunistic motive to patent applications. The paper enriches the research of intellectual property in standardisation.

Mapping the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in science, technology and innovation: application of machine learning in SDG-oriented artefact detection

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are a blueprint for achieving a better and more sustainable future for all by defining priorities and aspirations for 2030. This paper attempts to expand on the United Nations SDGs definition by leveraging the interrelationship between science and technology. We utilize SDG classification of scientific publications to compile a machine learning (ML) model to classify the SDG relevancy in patent documents, used as a proxy of technology development. The ML model was used to classify a sample of patent families registered in the European Patent Office (EPO). The analysis revealed the extent to which SDGs were addressed in patents. We also performed a case study to identify the offered extension of ML model detection regarding the SDG orientation of patents. In response to global goals and sustainable development initiatives, the findings can advance the identification challenges of science and technology artefacts. Furthermore, we offer input towards the alignment of R&D efforts and patenting strategies as well as measurement and management of their contribution to the realization of SDGs.