How the 'n/d' tool can help with the problem of patent licensing
What is n/d within the Classification platform?
The n/d tool helps with the problem of patent licensing involving companies with large global portfolios in the following scenarios:
- Cross-licensing, to help calculate an estimate of a cross-license with another company
- Royalty payments attributable to multiple organisations
- Monetisation, to compare outcomes of patent sale versus licensing
- Acquisitions, to provide objective evidence of potential value when purchasing patent portfolios
- Patenting, to correlate portfolios to revenue and market share data
The Challenge
The n/d tool was inspired by the trend in litigation and arbitration to focus on global portfolio deals coupled with the inconsistency and bias involved in manual reading and sampling of large cohorts of patents.
While not all patents have equal value there is typically only a small number of high-valued patents, so it is unlikely that all of these will be included in one single portfolio, and when looking at large enough portfolios we can make useful estimates as the the relative strength of portfolios.
The Solution
The n/d tool helps calculate the number of patents in any technology that are owned by one company (the numerator, n), and the total population of families with a US grant (the denominator, d). This can be used to compare two companies portfolios, not just against each other, but against all patents covering the technology.
How was the n /d tool developed?
The n/d tool was created in collaboration with AST, the leading provider of patent defence solutions. AST has developed a list of technology classifiers based on market research conducted over the past 10 years and has analysed more than 100,000 patents.
How to create the n/d report
- Click 'n/d report' tile of the Classification home page
- Select the organisations of interest, or upload a list of patents
- Run the report as normal.
- Select whether to 'allow overlapping technologies' (default), or 'group in mutually exclusive technologies' and how you wish to group any unclassified patent families. For assistance in generating the report for the purpose of your n/d analysis, contact support@lexisnexisip.com
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When the report is ready, click the 'Export Reports' icon in the top left hand corner of your report (below). Then click the 'n/d report' option under the Export header, to begin your excel download.
If you have any questions or require assistance with this type of report, please do reach out to a member of the team on support@lexisnexisip.com. We'd be happy to talk you through the results of the report, for the various use cases shown at the top of this article.
Need help? Request support and we’ll connect you with a Classification expert.