| On a regular basis, LEDs Magazine reports on issues relating to LED patents, including both LED patent-infringement lawsuits and licensing agreements. These serve to highlight the ongoing struggle of ownership over fundamental LED technologies.
Given the growth of cost-competitive LED innovations and a wellspring of LED start-ups, the underlying technology behind the next bestselling LED product is constantly in flux. As a consequence, companies must continuously manage and redefine their own patent portfolios in the face of competition, or else risk losing the race for market success.
It can be very difficult for executives, entrepreneurs, and investors, many of whom are likely not to be patent experts, to stay on top of the often-complex, continually-evolving LED patent landscape.
But detailed patent information is usually required when researching new product initiatives, performing M&A diligence, looking at emerging technologies or assessing market leaders and laggards.
At February’s Strategies in Light meeting, LEDs Magazine was shown the LED PatentEdge database, which attempts to address the problem of providing LED patent information to non-patent experts.
Developed by IP Checkups, a patent research and analytics firm based in Berkeley, California, the LED PatentEdge is a web-based competitive intelligence solution and research database. It provides critical insight on new LED innovations by housing and sorting over 100,000 patent documents from worldwide patent authorities.
Issued and published patent documents from the United States, Europe, Japan, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are filtered into more than 50 LED categories such as bulbs, components, drivers, networks, materials, and others.
Within each LED category, users can apply search terms to track patent publications by company, inventor, region, technology keywords and many other fields. Robust analytics enable users to track the top companies and inventors in each LED category, and monitor the growth of new patent publications through patent filing and publication velocity data.
The LED PatentEdge solution is updated twice per month so users can track emerging innovations and changes in technology ownership.
For example, in the LED phosphor space, the top companies are Philips, Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, and Toshiba respectively, with the majority of filings in the United States and Japan (see charts). European patents have increased incrementally over the last five years, but still account for a small share of all innovations in the market compared to the United States.
The software can also compare patent filing and publication trends across LED technology spaces to assess areas of growth for potential investment, or white spaces for new R&D initiatives.
Users can download PDFs of each patent document for offline review, or download all charts and data for in-house analysis. In addition, IP Checkups offers custom patent databases that can be tailored to any technology area.
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