Looking at similar products compared to your own product can help to discover new innovation opportunities. This step by step article explains how you can use PatentInspiration to find innovation opportunities for a bicycle. You will learn how to define a filter and analyze patents by using the text and combination analysis.
Define your filter
We start by entering "bicycle" in the main search box of the PatentInspiration website. This gives us a patent pool of almost 260000 patents that are related to "bicycle":
PatentInspiration searches by default in ALL patent fields (Title, Abstract, Claims, Description, Applicants, Inventors, Codes and Number), which is good to get a quick overview of an applicant or product but it isn't easy to navigate through and there can be quite a lot of noise in this patents.
To further narrow down our patent pool, we edit our filter (
) and choose the KEYWORD filter type (
) with the patent fields Title and Abstract instead of the default ALL filter type. We also choose to only see the patents from the last 20 years (
). If we now click the search button again, we get a pool of 90000 patents which is good to start analyzing on.
Analyze patents
Now that we have our patent pool for bicycle, we want to find the properties of a bicycle, so we can then find similar products that have the same properties like a bicycle. One way to find the properties is by analyzing the adjectives in our patent pool of bicycle. We do this by running a text analysis ().
We configure the text analysis to find adjectives () in the Title, Abstract and Claims patent fields () in our patent pool. You can also select the Description field if you want but the analysis will then run a little bit longer. We also choose to only find the adjectives close to the word "bicycle" (
) otherwise we would get all the adjectives that are mentioned in the patent texts but we only want those related to bicycle. The analysis gives us the following result:
We can now make a selection of the best adjectives to find similar products compared to ours. Once we have a selection, we can start a combination analysis (
). The combination analysis will combine your selection by running a search for all the terms. This prevents you to do a very search intensive manual work.
We configure our combination analysis by selecting the Title, Abstract and Description fields (
) in which we want to search for similar products as bicycle. The more fields you select here, the longer the combination analysis will take to complete. The terms need to be entered comma separated into the textarea (
): adjustable, collapsible, comfortable, foldable, folding, pneumatic, portable, wheel.
Finally we also need to make sure that we select the search in all patents option (
), so we can find similar products instead of searching in our current patent pool. Once the analysis is finished, you will get an overview of how many patents were found that contain those terms:
By exploring those combinations and their related patents, you can find the related products compared to a bicycle. From scooter to wheelchair, these are products that have similarities with a bicycle but are not a bicycle. Using the sorting functionality on the combination analysis can help you to improve your search. For example, if you sort by the "wheel*" term, you will get a lot more bicycle related combinations.
Conclusion
Being in the business of bicycles, you can watch their domains for latest innovations and harvest the good ideas as technology import to the bicycle domain. Also a bicycle producer could explore these products as new markets or places to enforce new Intellectual Property (IP).
Try it yourself on PatentInspiration or take a look at the demo report we've used to create this article.