Products : Case Studies : Ericsson Infocom

Patent weapons
How patent research can keep the competition on the run

(by Urban Lindh MSc, Senior Specialist, Patent Intelligence, Ericsson Infocom Systems (Sweden))

The successes of Ericsson are largely due to long-term investments in research and massive development endeavours. Annual investments in recent years have amounted to about 15-20 percent of sales. More than 22,000 employees in 23 countries are active in research and development.

The business unit Infocom Systems provides communications solutions for public network carriers, enterprises and Internet Service Providers. Over the last few years Infocom Systems has started to address the converging landscape of the telecom and datacom industries.

Infocom Systems has been successful and its major product is the famous AXE switching systems, with 132 million lines sold, or on order, in 125 countries.

"It is the responsibility of every Ericsson company, business unit and project team to protect new technology and product feature with patents. Patent protection is the best way to secure our business opportunities in the market"' explains the IPR Manager of Infocom Systems, Mats Renntoft.

"The role of patent protection has changed over the years. Like most of its major competitors, for many years Ericsson only protected a small number of key inventions with patents. Today Ericsson and its competitors have taken a more proactive approach to patents. The company with the most powerful arsenal of patents will be the one to set the rules of the game that others must follow. The most advisable course of action is to build up a strong and competitive patent portfolio" Mats Renntoft continues.

Patent information research

In business intelligence you look at the surrounding world of a company to examine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats (SWOT analysis) for a business. Our aim with patent information research is to look at patents in the same way.

Today patents are valuable assets, allowing an organisation to not only defend its right to sell a product in a market, but also to negotiate the rights to use a patent. The more patents and patents applications you have, the stronger your position is. An additional advantage with patent information is that it's available as public information, and you can retrieve very detailed information from patent documents.

The content of patent databases helps you to discover:

• Who co-operates with whom.
• Who has transferred their patent rights to other companies.
• Who is developing a technology which is close to yours (citing patents).
• In which countries or markets are patents applied for.
• The legal status of a patent (when was the application filed or published? Is it granted or expired?).
• Who is the most active player in technology?
• What are the emerging trends?

This kind of information gives a good overview of a patent portfolio, and can be categorised using a patent analysis tool that I developed called MapOut Pro (MS Windows and NT compatible). To be thorough, there are no short cuts, you have to examine every patent of interest. I start by researching a company's structure, discovering, for example, if it's been involved in mergers or acquisitions. I then gather relevant patent information from Dialog databases and EPS (Ericsson Patent Search, a part of Derwent World Patents Index available on our intranet). I then import the results into MapOut Pro.

This allows me to sort the gathered patent information into different categories (cited, reassigned, granted etc) and patent classes. My MapOut Pro software is designed to ease administration and analysis of the search results, as well as enabling a systematic approach when selecting patents of interest.

Users of MapOut Pro agree that it is powerful, easy to use and time saving. I have even received comments such as "all the work was done for me" after using a MapOut database. "MapOut Pro has enabled us to considerably reduce the lead time of identifying relevant patents of interest from large patent portfolios. At the same time it has raised the quality of the results. This is extremely valuable when tracking competitors and new technologies in an environment where the competition is getting harder, and prompt actions are crucial", says Bengt-Ake Nilsson, who is working with IPR Management.

Urban Lindh currently works in the IPR Management & Patent Department in Ericsson Infocom Systems, which up to the end of the year, is one of the business units within Ericsson.

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