INNOVAL PROJECT
In an increasingly knowledge-based economy it is vital for companies to be able to quickly research information regarding patents, trademarks, and designs rights (collectively known as industrial property). However, while this information is publicly available, the tools to research it are limited, and using the services of specialized companies is expensive, especially for SMEs. Innovall aims to bridge this gap by creating a service that enables direct search and analysis of industrial property databases via a low-cost, easy-to-use web-based tool. Innovall’s objectives are thus to: The methodology used by the search tool improves on the common word-only search model. The user is asked to insert an Action and a Subject (e.g. “reduce friction”), to which synonyms are then added (e.g. “decrease”, “reduce”, “grip”, “resistance”) to capture conceptually related documents, rather than just the ones where the exact words appear. In this way Innovall’s results are more relevant and allow an easier cross-over of industrial property information from different business areas. This powerful way to research industrial property can save precious time and money by retrieving the documents that capture an idea rather than just a word. For example if a dishwasher company wants to find better ways to clean, it can just search for “clean object”, and all related documents will be retrieved: the engine’s answer depicts all patented ways related to “clean an object”. The Innovall tool also allows to search information on the companies holding patents, allowing to research their activities on several ways. The service is being initially deployed in 4 pilot countries: Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain. There it will be submitted to a 10 month period of tests and trials by a total of 60 SMEs and 8 public institutions. After this market validation phase, and based on the testers’ feedback, the service’s business plan for self-sustainability will be fully developed. It is expected that will be based on the offering of several search service packages, each of which presenting a different combination of cost, user access and features. After the end of the project the tool’s coverage will be slowly expanded beyond the 4 initial countries. This expansion will be based on finding local partners in other European countries to serve as representatives off the service. The Innovall service is being designed to fill a gap in the range of services commercially available, which today consists of either very limited but free (the crude search boxes of the online patent databases) or very complete but expensive (dedicated search provided by specialized companies and attorneys). The middle-range target set to Innovall should provide it with a core group of clients composed or Small and Medium Companies (SMEs), University departments and other organizations which necessitate to do Intellectual Property (IP) search but lack the resources or the need for expensive solutions. Giving the raising demand for IP, and particularly Business Intelligence, the Innovall consortium expects to achieve a market penetration that will enable the service to be profitable within the first 2-3 years of operation.
Schlüsselbegriffe
Länder
North Macedonia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Iceland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Montenegro, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Türkiye, United Kingdom