The Problem
IP owners can spend over $100K over the lifecycle of a patent. Whether you have a few technologies or a few thousand, the decisions you make about what to file, maintain, or monetize have significant impact on costs.
Up to 20% of the average fortune 500 company’s IP portfolio is unutilized. This costs companies an average of $10M per year – money that could be spent on new R&D.
Tradespace Solution
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Portfolio Intelligence: Categorize your portfolio based on products or technologies; track and quantify value in real-time based on business goals, competitors, and market dynamics
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AI-Powered Prior Art Search: Powerful, intuitive prior art search ensures you are confident in an applications novelty and have highlight the right references
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Smart Docketing: Build custom automations or use our built-in rules; monitor office actions to predict likelihood of grant
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Agreement Management: Tradespace integrates with powerful CLM tools to track agreements, ensure license compliance, and maximize royalty collection
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Portfolio Pruning: Identify opportunities to divest non-core assets before maintenance payments based on product mapping, evidence of use, and commercial value
Customer Story
AerospaceCo
AerospaceCo has built a portfolio of over 5,000 patents. Between new filings and maintaining patents, they spend $40M every year on patents.
Persistent economic uncertainty and a major product recall forced AerospaceCo's leadership to look for ways to reduce costs across the enterprise. As a cost-center, the IP organization was shortlisted as a condidate for staffing reduction to reduce costs. IP leaders turned to Tradespace to identify cost savings within their patent process to reduce costs without reducing the size of their team.
AerospaceCo used Tradespace to identify three potential areas for cost savings: Maintenance Payments, Ongoing Prosecution, and New Filings. Ultimately, AerospaceCo was able to save $7M in maintenance payments and prosecution costs in a single year. They also implemented a new disclosure evaluation framework based on Tradespace's AI Evaluation tools to reduce the volume of future filings, while also increasing the quality of their new filing pipeline.
Maintenance Payments:
Because AerospaceCo managed their IP portfolio in Tradespace, they had full visibility into the costs associated with every stage of the IP lifecycle. They also leveraged Tradespace's AI categorization tools to map disclosures, provisionals, applications, and grants to an internal technology and product taxonomy. This made it easy review every technology and product area in which AerospaceCo had upcoming maintenance payments.
AerospaceCo immediately realized that 40% of these assets no longer mapped to active products. Using Tradespace, they then analyzed these assets for evidence of use at their primary competitors. This left 700 patents that neither mapped to active products or read on competitors. By dropping these patents, AerospaceCo saved $4M in maintenance fees that year.
Patent Prosecution:
Using Tradespace's smart docketing tools, AerospaceCo identified 100 patent applications that either had a low likelihood of grant, or for which there was a limited ROI for continuing to respond to office actions given changes to the claims. Once again, Tradespace's dynamic mapping of applications to products and competitors made it easy to justify their decision to abandon nearly 25 applications.
New Filings
Lastly, AerospaceCo implemented a new process for evaluating new disclosures focused on patent quality instead of patent quantity. Using Tradespace's AI-powered disclosure evaluation tool, AerospaceCo was able to institute a series of gates based on patentability, detectability, and business strategy alignment that ensured they only filed on inventions that added significant value to the business that saved $1M the first year they implemented it