Overview of aerosol_&_dispensing_systems_patents_published_in_2014

Société VIEDOC 2, Rue Hélène Boucher 78280 GUYANCOURT (France) Tel : +33 (0)1 30 43 45 27

Aerosol & Dispensing Systems Patents

How to use patents to gather

Technical and Competitive Intelligence?

http://www.viedoc.fr/

Aerosol & Dispensing Systems - Current Status, PCD & ADF 2015

© VIEDOC – For further information: [email protected] / 10

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT VIEDOC CONSULTING ........................................................................................................ 3

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 4

WHY & HOW TO USE PATENTS AS A VALUABLE SOURCE OF INFORMATION? .................................. 5

1.1. WHY USE PATENT INFORMATION? .................................................................................................................. 5

1.2. HOW AND WHERE TO FIND VALUABLE PATENT INFORMATION? ............................................................................ 5

1.3. BEFORE STARTING LOOKING INTO PATENTS ....................................................................................................... 5

REVIEW OF AEROSOL & DISPENSING SYSTEMS PATENTS PUBLISHED IN 2014 .................................. 6

2.1. USING KEYWORDS AND ESPACENET TO COLLECT AND SELECT RELEVANT PATENTS .................................................... 6

2.2. MAKING SENSE OUT THE 87 SELECTED PATENTS ................................................................................................ 7

2.3. APPLICANTS PROFILES .......................................................................................... ERREUR ! SIGNET NON DEFINI. 2.3.1. Devices users ........................................................................................... Erreur ! Signet non défini. 2.3.2. Inventors ................................................................................................. Erreur ! Signet non défini. 2.3.3. Devices manufacturers ........................................................................... Erreur ! Signet non défini.

2.4. APPLICANTS COUNTY OF ORIGIN ............................................................................ ERREUR ! SIGNET NON DEFINI. 2.5. PATENTS COVERAGE ............................................................................................ ERREUR ! SIGNET NON DEFINI. 2.6. OVERVIEW OF SOME PATENTS PUBLISHED IN 2014 ................................................... ERREUR ! SIGNET NON DEFINI.

2.6.1. Consumer Goods ..................................................................................... Erreur ! Signet non défini. 2.6.2. Cosmetics ................................................................................................ Erreur ! Signet non défini. 2.6.3. Food & Beverage .................................................................................... Erreur ! Signet non défini. 2.6.4. Health & Hygiene .................................................................................... Erreur ! Signet non défini.

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................ 8



ABOUT VIEDOC CONSULTING

Founded in 2004, Viedoc is one of France’s leading competitive & technical intelligence

consultancy firms.

With a staff of highly proficient professional consultants serving both public and private

clients with comprehensive strategic, economic & technical analyses, Viedoc provides

companies with:

States of the art;

Patent monitoring;

Competitive & technological intelligence;

Market research;

Technology transfers;

Benchmarking;

Business intelligence;

Knowledge management;

....

Intelligence usually does not require mandatory life‐ long skills within the company but

necessitates getting the right information at the right time. Viedoc works for customers both

on extended and short periods of time and accompanies firms of all size and working in all

sectors in their decision’s making.

Viedoc Consultants have a pragmatic approach built on a rigorous methodology for

collecting, processing, analyzing and delivering high added-value information. Thanks to

their 360° vision, Viedoc Consultants are able to provide companies with services tailored to

their needs and meet their requirements through careful listening.

As recognized experts in the identification of potential technology transfers, Viedoc

consistently builds on a multisectoral vision providing professionalism and expertise to its

Clients, from large industrial groups to SMEs, across a dozen of industrial sectors.



INTRODUCTION

Patents are a great source of information for many reasons and we think that companies

should be more aware of this. Patents may seem hard to come around at first glance, but

with (a lot of) patience, with a good methodology and some training most people can find

their way through them.

For the third time in a row this year and thanks to Jean-Pierre Appert, Oriex’ CEO, Viedoc will

be at the PCD & ADF exhibition.

We are also very grateful to Jean-Pierre to have given us the opportunity to take part in one

of the conference sessions this year to present Viedoc Consulting’s approach to gathering

technical & competitive intelligence from patents.

But what lies behind Technical & Competitive Intelligence?

Technical & Competitive Intelligence is a process which gives insights into what might

happen in the near future. This process involves stages from data to information to

intelligence.

Intelligence differs from data and information since it requires some form of analysis. The

purpose of this analysis is to derive some meaning from the gathered data and information.

We need not collect and analyze all information for an exact picture, but get enough

information so that we can conclude what is going on. An outcome of CI is that it puts

conclusions and recommendations upfront.

Fundamental information can be gathered from:

Information about your industry (such as monitoring trade journals)

Financial transactions (such as credit ratings)

Publicly released information (such as regulatory filings by a competitor)

Non Confidential Information between buyers and sellers to identify who the

competition is.

Screening Pat & Non Pat Publications of Competitor.

Press releases, analyst reports, trade journals, transcripts of speeches, and other

published sources of information.

And how Competitive Intelligence differs from Market Research

Market-research teams typically focus on supporting a specific area by identifying market

gaps for their products to fill. Competitive-intelligence teams, on the other hand, use similar

data - along with countless other resources - to predict market changes, preempt

competitor activities, and develop strategic contingency plans. There are large areas of

overlap; market research can also be considered as a subset of competitive intelligence.1

1 Role of IP in competitive Intelligence gathering and analysis, Dr Shantanu De Ranbaxy

www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/sme/en/wipo_ip_del_10/wipo_ip_del_10_theme05_4.ppt

http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/sme/en/wipo_ip_del_10/wipo_ip_del_10_theme05_4.ppt



WHY & HOW TO USE PATENTS AS A VALUABLE SOURCE OF INFORMATION?

1.1. WHY USE PATENT INFORMATION?

There are three main reasons one may want to look into patent to gather information:

For their technical content

to identify some of the latest innovations in or outside your field

to carry out a state of the art before launching an R&D program

For business planning & development

to know what your competitors are up to

to find out about patents in the public domain

For protecting the innovations within your own organization (through Intellectual

Property Professionals)

1.2. HOW AND WHERE TO FIND VALUABLE PATENT INFORMATION?

Patent information is available to everyone, but depending on your needs the tools used to

look into it may not be the same. Basically speaking, there are three main ways of fetching

information form published patents:

Using commercial patent databases

Contracting with consulting companies or intellectual property professionals

Using the free database from the European Patent Office (EPO) available at

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/?locale=en_EP

1.3. BEFORE STARTING LOOKING INTO PATENTS

Because searching/finding relevant patent information may be very tedious, it is wise and

essential to take time to ask the right questions before starting. Depending on the objective

and the information one is looking for, the questions may be for instance:

What am I looking for?

What are the best key words to use?

Do I need to search on a limited period of time?

Do I need to search worldwide?

How am I going to organize my searches?

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/?locale=en_EP



REVIEW OF AEROSOL & DISPENSING SYSTEMS PATENTS PUBLISHED IN 2014

What are the latest developments and innovations?

Who is leading the market today in terms of patent publications?

In this part, we explain how to carry out a patent survey on a specific topic. Since the

presentation is delivered during the Aerosol & Dispensing Forum, we decided to run searches

on dispensing systems and devices in order to get a picture of what has been happening

during the year 2014 patent wise.

2.1. USING KEYWORDS AND ESPACENET TO COLLECT AND SELECT RELEVANT PATENTS

We see here that firstly we need to define what we are looking for in order not to get too

many matches that we would be unable to deal with.

Using Espacenet, we run a first search using “« dispensing device » or « dispensing system »”

as keywords in the title and without any specifying the year range.

This lead to 18 997 matches, meaning that the whole Espacenet database possesses that

many patents with dispensing device » or « dispensing system » in their titles.

When we specified that we were looking for patents published in 2014, this number dropped

to 857.

Although this number is far more reasonable for human examination, it was still considered

too large for the ADF presentation, whose aim was to explain how to collect and find

meaningful information in patents. Although looking rapidly through the titles we could spot

too many irrelevant patents.



We therefore needed to refine the search and add more keywords in order to get less

patents falling outside our scope of interest. Adding “packaging or container or bottle or

flask or aerosol” keywords lead to 3 808 hits on the whole database, and 140 hits when 2014

was specified.

From the 140 patents selected, only 87 were left after thorough examination and elimination

of irrelevant ones.

As can be seen, the process of collecting and selecting patents may be pretty lengthy

especially if the keywords used have a wide scope, are used in many different fields or have

several meanings.

The keywords combinations used here were pretty simple but one should keep in mind that

Espacenet is a powerful tool that allows more complex searches using Boolean operators.

Another interesting feature of Espacenet is that it allows exporting results in the .xls format

which is handy for further work and filtering.

2.2. MAKING SENSE OUT THE 87 SELECTED PATENTS

For the sake of this case study on “what has been happening in 2014 on the dispensing

business in terms of patents?” we could ask 3 main questions:

- Who has published patents in 2014?

- From which countries were the applicants from?

- What type of country coverage did these applicants choose?

A competitive intelligence specialist needs to answer these kinds of questions in order to get

a clear picture of their company’s environment. If this is necessary, this is obviously not

enough, and to get a greater insight into what a company’s competitors are up to, a regular

patent watch must be carried out.



To continue reading please go to:

www.viedoc.fr/aerosol-dispensing-systems-how-to-use-patents-

to-gather-technical-and-competitive-intelligence/

http://www.viedoc.fr/aerosol-dispensing-systems-how-to-use-patents-to-gather-technical-and-competitive-intelligence/

http://www.viedoc.fr/aerosol-dispensing-systems-how-to-use-patents-to-gather-technical-and-competitive-intelligence/



CONCLUSION

Searching and going through patents may be very tedious. However, patents are a valuable

source of information, as patents will provide you with very useful information on:

the market in general

what your competitors are working on

latest innovations and developments in your field

technical solutions from other fields

There are several tools on the market to make statistical analysis on patent publications.

These tools are very useful, and even indispensable, to have a macroscopic view on patent

publications trends for instance. When finer understanding is required, there is no tool (yet) to

replace human in-depth analysis.

For this complementary study we used the generic terms “dispensing device or system”, but

in most cases searches are carried out with much more specific keywords combinations to

meet our clients’ specific needs.



2 rue Hélène Boucher

F – 78280 Guyancourt

Website: www.viedoc.fr

Email: [email protected]

Phone: +33 (0)1 30 43 45 27


mailto:[email protected]


Overview of aerosol_&_dispensing_systems_patents_published_in_2014

Engineering

Transcript of Overview of aerosol_&_dispensing_systems_patents_published_in_2014