What is the geography waterfall report?
The geography waterfall analysis will help to identify an organisation's strategy for filing patents. Create the report by including one, or multiple organisations and the Geography Waterfall report will uncover the following questions:
- What is the filing prioritisation strategy for each organisation across different territories? What are my competitors’ geographic strategies?
- What are the filing trends for different jurisdictions over time?
- Are there different filing strategies for different technology clusters? Geographic filing can be compared at a portfolio and cluster level.
How to create the geography waterfall report:
1. Click 'Report Builder' to create a new report
2. Using the organisation search functionality, add portfolios into the report
3. When you're happy with your selection, click 'Next'. From here you can name your report and select your technology grouping options.
4. After running the report, click the 'Export Reports' icon in the top left hand corner of your report (below). Then click the 'Geographic Waterfall' option to begin your excel download. Note: The report output will show the number of families with 1, 2, 3, 4... etc grants in each territory.
How to interpret the data:
Size: Number of granted territories within each patent family - for example, the column shows families with one granted territory, or families with anywhere from one to two granted territories, or one to five granted territories and so on. This is so you can review competitor's filing strategies to see, if they grant in two territories, where do they predominantly choose to grant first.
Count: Number of patent families of that 'size' range - for example, within the portfolio, how many families consist of anywhere between one and five granted territories. This allows you to move along the line and see, of those 726 families, where does the organisation choose to grant first, then second, then third and so on.
Acc: Accumulated percentage of patent families in that range - for example, across the portfolio, what percentage is made up of families with between one and two granted territories.
Chart representation of these results
In the following portfolio, there are 667 patent families with between one and two granted territories, and this accounts for 73% of the granted territory distribution for that organisation.
The rows with the country codes US, GB, CN, AU, JP, CA, HK, KR, IL, illustrate what percentage of families of that 'size' (between one and two territories) have granted patents in that jurisdiction e.g. 4% of the 667 patent families with between one and two granted members, have a CN grant.
Family size (x axis): Number of members within
a patent family
Coverage (y axis): Percentage of coverage
Count: Number of patent families of a certain
'size'
Legend: Jurisdiction
The organisation only starts to file for patents in the Netherlands (NL) when they expand to the sixth member.
The data shown in this chart illustrates the number of applications in specific jurisdictions year on-year, e.g. The organisation filed for 46 US application in 2015.
Priority year (x axis): The date the first
patent application in the patent family was filed
Filing territories (y axis): The percentage
of applications filed
Legend: Jurisdictions
e.g. There was an increase in the number of filings in the US between 2016 and 2020 There has been a decrease in the number of filings in Australia since 2018. NOTE: Click the tab with the organisation name within the Excel output to analyse filing strategies for different technologies.
Example Analysis 1:
1. Ninety-four percent of the portfolio's patent family have only one member which almost exclusively covers US. This signals that the US is the most important territory (YELLOW).
2. Territories US, JP, CN are the main focus and core regions (RED).
3. Two-part filing strategy where smaller families filed in US, CA, and Asia Pacific (PURPLE). And with increasing size, the filing strategy shifts more towards EU territories (ORANGE).
Example Analysis 2: Narrow coverage
Example Analysis 3: Wider Coverage
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