What is the purpose of a patent search?
Patent searches are highly relevant in many ways. Their results help to:
Avoid unnecessary costs when planning to protect your own invention
A patent search can be used to determine whether your invention is already known. If it is, you save the costs of preparing and filing a patent application that is not worthwhile. Early research helps to avoid such financial misinvestments.
Avoiding legal infringements
Before a new product or technology is developed or launched on the market, it should be checked whether existing patents could be infringed. Infringement of third-party patents can lead to warnings, claims for damages, or sales bans by the owner of the infringed patent and is always costly, often massively so.
Monitoring competition
Patent searches are ideal for finding out about competitors’ developments and, if necessary, monitoring them further to avoid possible future infringement. Patents provide information about technological trends and strategies of other market participants.
Innovation incentives
Patent databases contain the latest knowledge in the field of technology and are therefore usually years ahead of reference books, for example. Conducting a search will familiarize you with solutions that may only recently have been considered elsewhere. This knowledge of existing technologies can inspire you and play a role in finding further, improved solutions.
Discovering licensing opportunities
Sometimes it is more strategic to license existing patents rather than develop something entirely new. A patent search tells you who might be interested in the solution you have developed.
Recognize market and technology trends
By analyzing patent applications, technological developments and market trends can be identified at an early stage, which helps companies to adapt their innovation and investment strategies.
How does a patent search work?
An effective patent search requires a systematic approach to find relevant patents and evaluate them correctly.
The first step is to clearly define the objective of the search. Depending on your needs, there are different types of searches: A novelty search checks whether an invention is patentable. Freedom-to-operate (FTO) searches, on the other hand, ensure that no existing patents are infringed. Competitive analysis serves to monitor competitors’ patents and thereby gain strategic insights. Finally, technology trend analysis helps to identify current developments in a specific field of technology and recognize innovation potential at an early stage.
We are happy to carry out all these searches for you and advise you which are useful and effective for you.
We use both free and paid patent databases for this purpose. The most important free databases that are accessible to everyone include:
Espacenet (European Patent Office): https://worldwide.espacenet.com
DEPATISnet (German Patent and Trademark Office): https://depatisnet.dpma.de
Google Patents: https://patents.google.com
WIPO PATENTSCOPE (worldwide patents): https://patentscope.wipo.int