Download the White Paper "New Frontiers in the Strategic Use of Patent Information" to find out how patent mapping is enabling a greater understanding of patent registration.

 

Dr Victor Zhitomirsky of PatAnalyse and Dr Peter Harrop of IDTechEx have collaborated to produce the world's first computer analysis of the previously impenetrable patent thicket surrounding Advanced Energy Storage. A particular focus is electric vehicle technology such as traction batteries in general, lithium-ion traction batteries, supercapacitors/ ultracapacitors, battery management systems and charging. However, there is thorough coverage of lithium batteries and supercapacitors in general for those more widely interested in these topics. The results are startling. Some of the most respected giants of the industry are dismantling their R&D in order to pump money into production facilities just when the technology is rapidly changing. The company with a strong, broad patent portfolio, that is the fastest increasing one, is rarely mentioned in the press as a leader in this subject. Our measurements reveal that one giant landing the biggest orders rarely has its huge portfolio of patents cited, a warning on IP quality.

 

Supercapacitors (ultracapacitors) have a surge in demand and interest from EV manufacturers. So why is supercapacitor patenting stagnant and why is Europe largely ignoring the subject? We reveal many other openings for newcomers and opportunities for giants to realign their research. We reveal the most prolific inventors and the fine details of patent trends in many aspects of anode and cathode chemistry for example. Our sophisticated computer analysis provides the first clarity on the very different technological emphasis of the research being carried out by a host of companies and research organisations worldwide. We give our expert opinion on this.

The patent search strategy has been carefully developed via several rounds of iteration. As a rule of thumb, it takes at least five years from invention to the first product on the market. In order to focus on the `hidden' R&D efforts which have not yet materialised as new products on the market, the initial study has been restricted to patents with a priority date from 2005. However because of a significant increase in the rate of patenting in this area, this initial patent portfolio contains over half of all patents with a priority from 1990 in this area.

About 2,800 original Assignee names from the original bibliographic records were combined into 200 Top Assignees. The proprietary de-duplication algorithm aggregated about 12,000 simple patent families from about 40,000 national patents. Only 3% of the patent families have been left unassigned and it was further found that about 12% of the patent portfolio is assigned to small players with fewer than one invention per year. The remaining 85% of the patent portfolio is assigned to about 250 companies with about 66% of the patent portfolio assigned to the top 50 companies in terms of patenting. Almost a hundred Patent Maps have been provided in the report to facilitate the detailed understanding of various aspects of the patent landscape.

 

The Advanced Energy Storage Technologies Report uniquely illustrates the distribution of patents using patent maps. Below are some examples of the different kind of patent maps that feature in the report.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The patent search has been carried out using the DocDB patent database provided by the European Patent Office. It has been further restricted to patent families containing either US patents, EP patents, or international PCT patents. Patents taken exclusively in Japan, Korea or China were considered as relatively unimportant inventions as they are not aiming to achieve monopoly rights in the major European or US markets. Indeed all Asian players are actively applying for patents in foreign jurisdictions. For instance, in the subject area of the current patent study Japanese and Korean applicants heavily dominate US patent applications. PatAnalyse has used its iterative self-learning broadly inclusive approaches to searching methods to ensure that all relevant patents are considered. Further details of the methodology are published in the white paper available at www.IDTechEx.com/evWhitePaper. PatAnalyse strongly believe that the key to patent search and analysis is the judicious use of both IT and expert judgement. The core approach is based around good collaboration between the subject area expert insight and judgement on one side, and an artificial intelligence algorithm taking into account an advanced combination of semantics and meta-data pattern recognition on the other side. The algorithms are specifically developed for learning an optimal combination of a huge number of features in prediction or classification tasks. In the past these techniques have routinely demonstrated the ability to find several times more relevant patents than experienced information specialists in client organisations. Results of the search at each iteration step are further manually cleaned from irrelevant entries and classified by the subject area experts under the strict control from the quality audit artificial intelligence algorithm. The quality audit meta-analysis is continuously trained with already classified patents from the patent portfolio. The Initial edition of the Patent Report is restricted to the patents with a priority date from 2005 which represent about half of all patents with a priority from 1990 related to the subject area of the Patent report. As a result the current portfolio includes about 40,000 patents combined into about 12,000 simple patent families.

Electric Vehicle experts IDTechEx have encapsulated over ten years of research and analysis into an easy to digest electric vehicle encyclopedia. All the technologies are covered and supported with over 100 tables and illustrations and over 200 acronyms and terms are explained. This encyclopedia, worth $1,500, is given as a free PDF download when you buy this report.

All report purchases include up to 30 minutes telephone time with an expert analyst who will help you link key findings in the report to the business issues you're addressing. This needs to be used within three months of purchasing the report.

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