Patent Application
20060085249
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for evaluating patents based on statistically significant correlates of strength and value. The present invention enables a more ready comprehension of the relative commercial value of the patent assets being evaluated.
Often, it is difficult for a company seeking to acquire patent assets to properly value these assets. Specifically, it may be necessary or commercially useful to consider factors other than the objective value of the patent. In the past, however, it has been difficult for companies to properly value patent assets they wish to acquire.
To this end, the present invention provides a method and apparatus of data mining that ranks related patents based on statistically significant correlates of strength and value. According to a non-limiting embodiment of the present invention, relative value may be established by aggregating the resulting Z score with input objective data related to industry size, relevant product sales, as well as other input that may be obtained from a population of surveyed experts in the relevant field of technology.
According to another non-limiting embodiment of the present invention, the relationship between the various components of the Z score may be expressed based on weighted combinations of several predicates. The user may select portions of the Z score to analyze the underlying data correlates. The user may also interact to control the Z score correlates and to adjust these correlates to focus attention on certain aspects of the Z score that most interest the user. In short, the Z score of the present invention enables more ready comprehension of the relative commercial value of patent assets.
More specifically, the present invention provides, as a non-limiting aspect, a method for determining a relative value of at least one patent, the method including: calculating a Z score for the at least one patent; and modifying the Z score based on at least one subjective factor.
Another non-limiting aspect of the present invention provides a system for determining a relative value of at least one patent, the system including: a database configured to store at least one factor for calculating a Z score for the at least one patent; a database for storing at least one received subjective factor relevant to the at least one patent; a first computer program product configured to calculate a Z score based on the at least one factor; a second computer program product configured to modify the Z score based on the at least one subjective factor, thereby obtaining a modified Z score; and a third computer program product configured to output the modified Z score.
With reference to
Additionally, Z scores are an application of the rules of transformation. An item's Z score indicates a direction and distance of the item's deviation from the mean of the distribution. The Z score is generally expressed in units of the distribution's standard deviation. If every item in a distribution is converted to a Z score, the transformed Z scores will necessarily have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1.
Z scores are also referred to as standard scores. The Z score is useful when seeking to compare the relative standings of items from distributions with different means and/or different standard deviations.
When the distribution of the items is normal, Z scores are very useful. In every normal distribution, a distance between the mean and a Z score divides a fixed proportion of the total area under the curve.
A normal distribution approximates the distribution of values of a characteristic. The normal distribution is useful to model many types of information. The exact shape of a normal distribution depends on the mean and standard deviation of that distribution. The standard deviation measures the spread and indicates the amount of departure of each value from the mean.
Differences in standard deviation model the shape of the distribution. Although the distribution remains symmetric, the normal distribution becomes flatter as the standard deviation increases. With a large standard deviation, there is great diversity between individual items in the normal distribution. Generally, changes in standard deviation do not affect the mean, and changes in the mean do not affect standard deviation.
One Z score that may be used is the Altman Z score. In the early 1960s, the Altman Z score was developed. The Altman Z score relies upon statistical techniques to predict a company's probability of failure using eight variables from a company's financial statements. These factors include earnings before interest and taxes, total assets, net sales, market value of equity, total liabilities, current assets, current liabilities, and retained earnings. These factors are weighted relative to their particular importance under the Altman method. These results are then added together to obtain a Z score value. The Altman Z score is a measurement of the financial health of a company and a powerful diagnostic tool for forecasting a probability that a company may enter bankruptcy within a 12-18 month period. Most studies measuring the effectiveness of disease score technique have shown that the model is accurate in predicting bankruptcy more than 80% of the time. Investors often use the Altman Z score to determine whether or not a company is a reliable investment.
The Altman Z score, as well as other Z score techniques, are also applicable to intellectual property assets. Specifically, it is possible to apply the Altman Z score factors to patent assets. However, simply calculating the Z score from the patent asset may not be enough to determine if the patent asset is worth an investment. Thus, the present invention remedies this deficiency by accounting for objective and subjective factors. The objective factors may include industry size, relative product sales, the number of competitors in this particular technology field, the market value of the owner, forward citations in the United States Patent Office (USPTO) database, the number of patents in the same patent family, the number of claims, the number of oppositions to the patent, the number of independent claims, the number of backward citations, the number of reexaminations, and the age of the technology patented. Subjective factors may also include the potential importance of the technology in an industry and other input from a population of surveyed experts in a relevant field of technology.
By incorporating these objective and subjective factors in the Z score calculation, it may be possible to obtain a more accurate representation of the potential patent asset's values. Additionally, the objective and subjective factors may be accorded different weights in the Z score calculation. These different weights may reflect the relative importance of each factor. On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the most important, some non-limiting weighting examples may include relative product sales being given a weighting coefficient of 7. The industry size may be weighted, for example, as a 6. The age of the technology may have a weight of 5, for example, and the number of competitors may be given a weight of 2.
Alternatively, highly relevant objective factors such as the patent age, the market value of the owner, the forward citations in the USPTO database, the number of patents in the same patent family, the number of claims, and the number of oppositions may be weighted equally. Other relevant objective factors may be given half the weight of the highly objective relevant factors. These relevant (but not highly relevant) objective factors include the number of independent claims, the number of backward citations, and the number of reexaminations. The subjective factors including survey results of experts in the field and the relative importance of the technology in the field may be given twice the weight of the highly relevant objective factors.
To this end, as illustrated in
This invention conveniently may be implemented using a conventional general purpose computer or microprocessor programmed according to the teachings of the present invention, as will be apparent to those skilled in the computer art. Appropriate software can readily be prepared by programmers of ordinary skill based on the teachings of the present disclosure, as will be apparent to those skilled in the software art. Specifically, all of the equations may be implemented by suitably selected computer hardware and software.
As illustrated in
As stated above, the system includes at least one computer readable medium. Examples of computer readable media are compact discs, hard disks, floppy disks, tape, magneto optical disks, PROMS (e.g., EPROM, EEPROM, Flash EPROM), DRAM, SRAM, SDRAM, etc. Stored on any one or on a combination of computer readable media, the present invention includes software for controlling both the hardware of the computer and for enabling the computer to interact with a human user. Such software may include, but is not limited to, device drivers, operating systems and user applications, such as development tools. Computer program products of the present invention include any computer programmed to perform the method of the invention as well as any computer readable medium which stores computer instructions (e.g., computer code devices) which when executed by a computer cause the computer to perform the method of the present invention. The computer code devices of the present invention can be any interpreted or executable code mechanism, including but not limited to, scripts, interpreters, dynamic link libraries, Java classes, and complete executable programs. Moreover, parts of the processing of the present invention may be distributed for better performance, reliability, and/or cost. For example, processing in regard to the first function may be performed on a first computer and processing in regard to the second function may be performed on a second computer and the results combined.
The invention may also be implemented by the preparation of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or by interconnecting an appropriate network of conventional component circuits, as will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art.
Obviously, numerous modifications and variations of the present invention are possible in light of the above teachings. It is therefore to be understood that within the scope of the appended claims, the invention may be practiced otherwise than as specifically described herein.
