How the n/d tool can help with the problem of patent licensing
What is n/d?
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 feature 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.
For more information on how to use the n/d tool to calculate the cost of a cross license, learn more here.
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