A business built around innovation intelligence
The success of every business depends on its ability to effectively meet customer needs. For technology transfer consultancy firm, Fuentek, their customers solicit their help in optimizing and prioritizing their intellectual property portfolios, in addition to sourcing new technology solutions to help solve problems within their business. When it comes to delivering on their client mandates, innovation intelligence plays an integral role in Fuentek’s overall success.
Prior to using PatSnap, Fuentek was attempting to make the most of an inefficient process for gathering and analyzing innovation data. At the center of their difficulties, was having to navigate several databases to retrieve information and not having a simple way of articulating their findings. “The ability to do [a search] on a client as an assignee and find out all of the innovations they have and what the status is, we can do that very quickly with PatSnap,” said Laura Schoppe, President and Founder of Fuentek. “With the prior tools that we had, we couldn’t download this information, and we didn’t have the graphical aspects of taking a look at a portfolio.”
Data visualizations produce faster and smarter analyses
Schoppe points to the text-heavy nature of IP resources as one of the key obstacles to Fuentek’s research. After bringing PatSnap on board in 2012, Schoppe saw immediate benefits to the speed and quality of Fuentek’s IP analyses as a result of PatSnap’s visualization capabilities. It enabled her team to quickly and easily identify key themes, areas of opportunity, and potential risks within an IP area.
“Prior to PatSnap, we would have to comb through data pretty tediously, in order to narrow things down and get a feel for who the top assignees are as well as how often and when they are patenting their innovations,” said Schoppe. “That ability to look at these trends very quickly and understand them, we essentially didn’t have. We either weren’t doing it accurately or weren’t doing it at all because there was no way to do it in a time-efficient way.”
Michelle Ormond, Market Researcher at Fuentek, credits PatSnap’s landscape tool with helping her perform meaningful analyses of the innovation ecosystem to understand if there’s an actual market need for client’s innovation. “[PatSnap’s] landscape map shows us exactly where a specific technology fits within the landscape in relation to different innovation areas,” said Ormond. “It gives us an overview, and very easy graphics to look at, to determine our analysis of a specific IP or IP area.”
Delivering greater value to clients
Ormond recalls a time when one of their university clients solicited Fuentek’s help in determining which research applicants should receive funding from their seed program. Ormond used PatSnap’s insights and landscape tool to look at each of the technologies the researchers were developing to determine if they were in an IP area showing a positive trajectory toward commercialization. “Our client was able to make a funding selection confidently based on our analysis of the reports we pulled from PatSnap,” said Ormond. Fuentek’s report included their analysis of PatSnap graphs, which clearly showed the most active players in that technology field. “The university ended up sending our final reports to the researchers to help them come up with their marketing strategies because it gave them insights on potential licensees and partners who could help them down the road.”
Using time and cost savings to their advantage
In addition to significant time savings, cost effectiveness was another area that helped to differentiate PatSnap from prior tools. “It represented big cost savings for us to move over to PatSnap. We went to getting the same and even more capabilities than what we were getting before [at a lower price],” said Schoppe.
The time and cost savings derived from PatSnap’s solution even allowed Schoppe to assess Fuentek’s offerings to determine where they could be expanding their services. “We’re offering things to clients that we couldn’t offer before because we couldn’t do it in a way that would have made sense from a cost perspective for our clients,” said Schoppe. “That ability has been priceless.”
Schoppe and Ormond know just how critical innovation intelligence is to the overall success of their business, and both affirm that PatSnap’s connected innovation intelligence capabilities powered by AI technology have completely transformed their operations. By using PatSnap, they’ve increased their volume of work, the quality of their client reports, and their ability to meet tight deadlines, resulting in tremendous growth to their business and enhanced customer satisfaction along the way.
