Patent thickets An overview Subject to peer review Intellectual Property Office is an operating name of the Patent Office This report was prepared by the Intellectual Property Office Patent Informatics Team, November 2011 E-mail:
[email protected] © Intellectual Property Office 2011 Intellectual Property Office Concept House Cardiff Road Newport NP10 8QQ www.ipo.gov.uk Patent thickets Executive Summary Executive Summary The Hargreaves Review of IP and Growth concluded that patent thickets can impact negatively on business and innovation. In response the Government committed to investigating the scale and prevalence of patent thickets, including whether they do in fact present a particular problem to small to medium enterprises (SMEs) seeking to enter technology sectors. This study is the first part of this work. Thus the current study was initiated with three key aims in mind: 1. to begin to take the debate around patent thickets away from anecdotal and micro- study approach, toward a more generalised methodology by providing a general taxonomy for discussing patent thickets; 2. to generate an automated methodology for detecting patent thickets in published patent data; and 3. to assess whether or not patent thickets present a barrier to entry for companies, particularly SMEs, in the UK. The phrase “patent thicket” is a descriptive term which highlights issues that new entrants to a market may face when attempting to innovate within, or enter into, a technology space having existing intellectual property rights. The most generally used definition of a thicket is that coined by Shapiro: “a dense web of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology” Equal weighting is given to fragmented technological areas (areas where there are large numbers of small patent holdings), or areas where there are small numbers of large players with large patent holdings, each of which creates a thicket that any entrants into the area will have to negotiate in order to be able to operate.