What this article covers
- Explains where PatentSight+ patent data comes from and how raw patent records are transformed into LexisNexis patent families.
- Introduces the core PatentSight+ indicators, including Technology Relevance, Market Coverage, Competitive Impact, and Patent Asset Index.
- Explains the key concepts that underpin PatentSight+, including the LexisNexis patent family definition, the Ultimate Owner concept, and the Reporting Date.
- Shows how PatentSight+ supports common business use cases, including benchmarking, portfolio management, licensing, M&A, and technology trend analysis.
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Where PatentSight+’s Data Comes From
The Core KPIs: Technology Relevance, Market Coverage, Competitive Impact, and the Patent Asset Index
Where PatentSight+’s Data Comes From
PatentSight+ collects worldwide patent data from patent offices such as the EPO, USPTO, and JPO which amounts to currently more than 100 million patent documents. This raw data is first cleaned into LexisNexis patent families, based on the European Patent Office’s simple patent family definition, ensuring each family describes one invention. From there, PatentSight+ determines each family’s legal status (active, inactive, or pending), its remaining lifetime, and its owner, using the Ultimate Owner concept maintained by a dedicated harmonization team.
For more detail, see Data Harmonization and Ownership Information.
The Core KPIs: Technology Relevance, Market Coverage, Competitive Impact, and the Patent Asset Index
Once patent families are cleaned (harmonized), PatentSight+ evaluates each one using two main indicators: Technology Relevance, a citation-based indicator, and Market Coverage, based on the size of the market in which the family is active. Multiplying these together produces the Competitive Impact which is the individual strength of a patent family. Summing the Competitive Impact of every family in a portfolio produces the Patent Asset Index, reflecting both the quantity and quality of a portfolio’s innovation. For full detail on each of these, see Technology Relevance, Market Coverage, and The Patent Asset Index Methodology.
Key Concepts
- LexisNexis Patent Family — members sharing the exact same set of priorities belong to the same family.
- Ultimate Owner — the legal owner holding 50%+ of shares in a subsidiary or group company, consolidated after manual corporate-structure research.
- Reporting Date — lets you view a portfolio as it existed at a past point in time, updated weekly, with the exception that ownership always reflects the current Ultimate Owner.
Use Cases
- Benchmarking — compare owners’ portfolio size and average Competitive Impact over time (e.g. tracking how Qualcomm and IBM’s portfolios diverged).
- Portfolio Management — use the Value Distribution chart to identify high-value patents worth keeping or licensing, versus low-value patents that may be pruning candidates.
- Licensing — compare internal vs. external Technology Relevance to identify patents valuable to your own R&D versus patents that may be valuable to license or sell to others.
- M&A — simulate the combined patent landscape of a merger (e.g. the European Commission’s use of PatentSight+ in the Dow-DuPont and Bayer-Monsanto merger reviews).
- Trend Scouting — spot early signals in citation trends before they become obvious (e.g. identifying Apple’s early patent activity citing Swatch, which preceded the Apple Watch).