Landscape, collection, and state of the art search may sound and look similar, but understanding their nuances can make a world of difference to the quality of your search results. Discover the key differences and why defining the scope, expectations, goals, and audience are four vital steps to success.
Compared to more "traditional" forms of prior art searches, the need for landscape, collection, and state of the art search (or SOTA) can be commonly overlooked or misunderstood.
As we covered in a previous webinar, these types of searches are broader than patentability, freedom-to-operate (FTO), and patentability searches, as they encompass a wider range of patent and non-patent literature related to a cross-section of a technology or IP portfolio/holding. This makes them especially useful for research and development (R&D), marketing, bibliographical review, ideation, analytics, and benchmarking reports and proposals.
Key Differences Between Landscape, Collection, and State of the Art Search
Despite the terms often being used synonymously, there are subtle differences between SOTA, collection, and landscape searches. These are best explained in correlation to the granularity of the search:
- State of the art/SOTA is a 'micro' search
Most suitable for R&D and bibliographical reviews, these types of searches assess smaller sets of patent and non-patent documents to analyze precise and specific solutions to a technical problem.
- Collection is a 'meso' search
Most suitable for strategic planning, collection searches assess medium volumes of documents for references that could help pinpoint specific technical drivers.
- Landscape is a 'macro' search
Most suitable for big picture, benchmarking, and marketing analysis, landscape searches assess larger volumes of documents to capture a broader view of innovation in a specific technology area, including what is on the horizon for that space.
Which Type of Patent Search Do You Need?
If your question is:
- Is this invention new?
Choose a patentability and pre-application search - What patents protect this product?
Choose a FTO (clearance) search - Is this patent valid?
Choose a validity search - What patents address this technical
problem?
Choose a state of the art search - What patents are driving innovation in this
field?
Choose a collection search - What is the state of innovation in this technical
field?
Choose a landscape search
Discover more patent search best practices, including how our prior art search tools can support your patent search strategy.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you call a search. What is important is that your chosen patent research or search provider is aligned with your search goals and how you plan to use the results.
4 Steps to Effective Patent Search
Step 1: Align and Communicate Your Search Goals Effectively
When working with a dedicated patent researcher or third-party search party, it's important to take a collaborative approach, as pre-search communication between you and the search team is critical to achieving the end goal. To help structure such sessions effectively, consider organizing:
- A brainstorming exercise with your engineers or inventors looking at known solutions to a problem you're trying to solve; or
- A business intelligence gathering exercise where you look at what entities are currently active in this space, as well as which entities are filing patents in a specific technical domain.
To maximize the effectiveness of your landscape, collection, or state of the art search project, we also recommend considering who will be reviewing the resulting report. For instance, will you and your team be reading the patents for content, or will the report be sent to internal stakeholders and decision-makers who are not as familiar with IP? If the patent data is to be used as statistical data to inform a business or marketing plan, a different type of report will be required.
Step 2: Define Your Search Scope
Once you've defined the search goal and how that goal is going to be achieved, the next step is to scope out the specifics of your search.
Your time is valuable, so you don't want to have to sift through an extensive and overly detailed report to find the actual results you need. That's why determining the exact search scope and, especially, what needs to be included or excluded in the results, is so important.
Consider what type of solution you want to investigate. Taking the domain of coffee capsules as an example, you could choose to run a search against a:
- specific design or the materials and packaging used,
- the ingredients, encompassing a food science investigation,
- the machines used to employ capsules and their operation, or
- the personalization of those capsules.
When searching patent literature, the scope of the search could
even be adjusted to what is claimed.
What Your Patent Search Report Should Contain
The final search report you receive should reflect the project goals, scope, and audience you defined at the start of the project. This could be:
- A report on representative patents for the technical field broken down by decades and technology sub-categories. We find these reports to be particularly suitable for patent engineers who are looking to understand how a technology or the different technical solutions have evolved over time.
- A scorched earth search report, which lists all possible solutions to a technical problem. These reports are particularly suitable for clients who want to see everything under the sun in a certain technical field, as opposed to limiting the search by jurisdiction, inventor, decade, or result.
- An in-depth analysis of the players, inventors, and investment trends, which combines IP and business information. These reports are particularly suitable for companies that are looking to identify inventors who are actively developing IP portfolios in different geographical regions worldwide. For example, in regions where a product or business hasn't been launched yet.
Step 3: Estimate and Allocate Time
As well as optimizing the results, defining the exact search scope in advance enables you to more precisely estimate the search effort (or its feasibility) with your search team or provider.
Time is a pivotal factor in all forms of patent searching, including landscape, collection, or state of the art search projects. By setting the scope in advance, you can avoid wasted time spent over-searching or reviewing useless results. By communicating on deadlines with your team or provider, you can also find the ideal balance between speed, quality ("noise"), and coverage.
When briefing your landscape, collection, or state of the art search, we recommend considering the following key points:
- For a state of the art search to identify representative references of solutions to a technical problem, we recommend 1-2 days. Full coverage is unnecessary for such searches, but low noise is required.
- For a collection search with a FTO consideration, we recommend 2-5 days. Documents must not be missed, and noise should not be allowed. If you go faster (or cheaper) here, you will spend a lot of your time reading useful references—or essential references could be missed.
- For a landscape search for analytics, we recommend a maximum of 2 days. Some noise is permissible as the patent list will not be ready fully; however, noise still needs to be kept low so as not to compromise the statistics.
Step 4: Identify Search Inputs
Once you know precisely what you want to include or exclude, the next step is to identify the relevant search inputs. When working with clients, we commonly approach this task by considering the following key questions:
- Should patent or non-patent literature (NPL) be included?
- Are there any patent or NPL references we should use as a starting point?
- Do you want us to cap the number of references reported?
- Is there a date limit (e.g. only the last 20 years or live art) or range of interest?
- Does the search need to be limited to any specific jurisdiction(s)?
- Which specific competitors or companies should be included or excluded in the search?
Five Key Takeaways for Effective Collection, Landscape, and State of the Art Search
Whether you manage patent searches in-house or work with specialist patent search providers, such as Questel, the following five points can help to make your search projects more efficient and effective.
- 1. Landscape, collection, or state of the art search can—and should—be finely adjusted to your specific needs, including search scope, time (effort/budget), coverage, and noise.
- 2. Always define the search type.
- 3. No matter who conducts the search, getting the search scoped correctly is the key to success.
- 4. A quick call can save you a lot of emails.
- 5. The searcher and client should take a collaborative approach
throughout the project.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.