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Jason Resnick, Patent AgentJason Resnick, Patent Agent at Minesoft, in conversation with CIO Applications speaks about difficulties faced by their client base, how Minesoft has responded to address such issues and future aspirations of the company.
Why look at patents?
Certainly, one need for patent information is in the research and development (R&D) community to access freedom to operate or otherwise stated as patent infringement risk mitigation. R&D groups also need to understand technology shifts to better direct funding and ensure they stay on top of the global trends, assessing emerging entrants and threats, or reducing expenditure waste through duplicative efforts and competitive landscaping. Patent data is critical for R&D to make buy vs. build decisions.
With the increasingly litigious nature of patent holders across the globe, patent information is now a critical data component to address in the boardroom and so Minesoft user communities nowadays include the C-suite, R&D engineers and executives, legal and legal operations, associated internal and external counsel and business unit, owners. In fact, organizations employing best practices for patent review committees typically now have members of marketing, sales, and finance sitting into digest critical business decisions surrounding patenting. At Minesoft, we try to help all these users make sense out of the mounds of data.
The company’s history spans over 20 years of innovation and development. From the first own-label product in 2000, the company has gone from strength to strength. One of our first products was in the field of Legal Status Tracking of patent documents. This was a tiresome task back in the day, like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the person looking needed to be a patent specialist. We know we managed to save people many hours of time checking meticulously through patent registers!
In 2003, Minesoft and RWS became partners in developing a new online patent database. Combining Minesoft’s innovative software solutions for the information industry and RWS’s reputation in language support services, specializing in accurate translations for the intellectual property industry. Together, the staff went on to create a globally renowned patent search & analysis database, cementing Minesoft’s position in the industry.
Who can benefit from access to Minesoft solutions?
As the number of user types across the IP lifecycle has multiplied over the years, so has the need for flexibility of search and analytics platforms with respect to functionality and ease of use. In the past, only specialized databases and access portals such as Dialog and STN have been able to allow sophisticated and well-trained users to manipulate input queries in hopes that they could then decipher the vast amount of data available.
Today, all manner of users need easy-to-query databases and the ability to seamlessly create everything from board level presentations to detailed invalidity reports. Search, and analytics platforms need to allow users to quickly go from initial query to intelligent graphical output, just as easily as to create search results ready to submit to worldwide patent offices. We have worked to constantly innovate our platforms to allow professional searchers as well as business executives to quickly gain the ability to answer business-critical questions in the timeliest manner. Search platforms should be built for users, by users, irrespective of what background these user communities have.
Such flexibility and Minesoft has struck the right balance between development cycles, all through listening to clients’ feedback.
Another example of this is a vertical specific tool modification. For instance, Minesoft has developed tools for people in the biotech, chemical and life sciences area, which range from the automation of text extraction and association to the ability to easily draw chemical structures for search input. So it is not just a matter of where on the executive food chain a user falls but also if they are focused on a particular vertical.
The availability and accessibility of patent information as well as the known value of patent data has increased exponentially
What kind of mixed responses have you received from your consumers over the years?
It is important to understand that gaining a client is one thing. Keeping them is another.
Minesoft has one of the highest client retention rates in the industry because we view client take-on as an investment. Client relationships in this industry are not profitable if they only held for one or two years, so investing in each relationship to ensure long-term dealings is the only way to stay ahead of the game.
One way is via unlimited customer service by highly trained, industry experienced success teams. Ensuring a client gets the most out of their subscription is important, so we take the time to make sure clients fully understand system and data capabilities with unlimited training. Another way is to not nickel-and-dime customers. What you see is what you get. By not having specialty add-on modules or data packs, not restricting sharing or distribution of information internally or to counsel, Minesoft puts more value in the hands of customer who in turn to stay with the company longer.
Once in a while, a customer does leave, only to return a year later due to data quality issues found elsewhere in the industry. Clients quickly learn that garbage-in is garbage-out so data cleanliness, accuracy and completeness is critical to stay on top of. This wins out over pretty pictures every time.
How far spread is Minesoft’s clientele?
As I noted above, the types of people who use our solutions can vary hugely, from where they are on an executive level and the area of industry they might come from, and where on the IP lifecycle the user sits. Whilst Minesoft is probably best known for PatBase, a professional patent search and analytics system, we have clients so far spread that many never search at all. For example, legal operations professions who may be paralegals or the like require access to clean data but for entirely different purposes. As such we introduced a new product called PatDocs in late 2018 which provides fully automated patent family trees, the ability to instantly create a fully filled in SB-08 information disclosure document (ready for PTO submission), the ability to download any number of patent PDFs (in bulk or individually) within seconds and the ability to create a sharable work product between colleagues or between inside and outside counsel.
R&D is also a huge area of focus for Minesoft where unlimited corporate/departmental wide access to an express based search system (PatBase Express) as well as a fully integrate workflow tool called Pat-KM which links legal, business and R&D professionals within a framework to simplify and manage internal IP knowledge.
The point is once you have an amazing database, you need to be able to serve it very differently to diverse and dispersed user groups. One size cannot fit all in patent data dissemination and the associated knowledge management thereof.
To answer the question of how spread the client base is, it is completely global, and we usually see the most embedded level of systems in the largest global organizations and law firms.
Where do you see you and your company a couple of years from now?
Minesoft has grown each year since we opened for business and we hope to see that trend continues. The business also gets more international each year as we find customers in new countries for our services that manufacture, innovate, and develop their own products. We have the main office here, but we are used across the world, mainly in advanced manufacturing economies but a small number of our new clients are also found in LDCs, some of which we give access to for free as part of a WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) initiative. This is the ultimate aim for us, to ensure the products we develop and the software we write is working to assist companies to harness the world’s innovation. Because many a technology solution has already been thought of by someone else and can be licensed abroad – there is no need to recreate the wheel in many cases.
2018 was an exciting year for us; we added twelve new full-text collections, increasing our coverage by twenty percent. As well as many enhancements to our suite of products, we launched a new web-based solution for the day-to-day patent user, PatDocs.
Of course, we hope to have another great year for 2018-19. The signs so far have been encouraging as we are told that our products are proving the most long-lasting in the professional patent searching business. In addition to this we will be updating with a new, even more, powerful search engine for a PatBase with a significant increase in functionality, speed and exporting.
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