رویکرد تیم مثلث : همکاری برای ارائه فن آوری های متنوع به مشتریان با تحقیقات کیفی اطلاعات ثبت اختراع

Patent information service activities cannot always easily be outsourced. External patent information consultants, in spite of their expertise, are sometimes not satisfying the customer's need for high quality searches. The cause of the inadequacy may be the consultant's lack of in-depth knowledge of a particular field of technology and insufficient acquaintance with the subject of study. Customers can cope with this by training the consultant and intensely reviewing the first assignments. If however the customer has limited knowledge of how patent information research is done, training and instructing the consultant and assessing performance may not be practicable. This article illustrates a collaborative approach that a technical consulting organisation which is also a PATLIB centre, having available a multitude of technical research consultants and a small team of patent information specialists, can apply, in association with the customer's own technical and/or product expert, to deal with these possible shortcomings. Sirris launched a pilot project to develop and implement a collaborative model. The article gives an account of how the model was created and implemented, and describes the lessons learnt after 2 years in use.

Sirris is the collective centre of the Belgian technological industry. We help companies in the implementation of technological innovations, enabling them to strengthen their competitive position over the long-term. About 130 technical experts, many of them involved in research consortia, visit companies on site, offer them technological advice, launch innovation paths, and provide guidance until they reach the implementation phase. Integrated into these innovation activities Sirris has delivered patent information services since 1998 to its customers, since 2002 being a member of the PATLIB network supported and coordinated by the European Patent Office and the Belgian Patent Office. Today 3 people are running the Sirris PATLIB. Two of them focus their efforts on providing patent information services. Whilst doing patent state-of-the-art sweeps for researchers, tackling the freedom-to-operate concerns of worried SME customers, assessing the patenting aspirations of our ambitious research partners, calming down panicking companies sued for infringement and sharing experiences with in-house patent information specialists of many companies about the performance of search consultants, it gradually became clear to us that the accepted model of a small team of patent information (PI) specialists doing patent research does not match the demand of a highly varied mix of companies. In 2009 we decided to develop a collaborative model. In a first step we created the profile of the ideal patent researcher and analysed the resources at Sirris that could be brought to bear by Sirris. Secondly we identified the building blocks of a model emulating the ideal patent researcher deploying these resources. In a third step, in the course of 2010, we started implementing in the Flanders Region these building blocks and a practical approach emerged. In a last but surely not final step we evaluated the approach after a first full year of practice in 2011.

The collaborative way of doing projects with customer's inventors or product specialists, Sirris technical and patent information experts in a team, managed by the patent information expert, has improved substantially since its launch in 2010. Certain routine elements (e.g. search strategies, reporting formats, documentation, analysis methods) have been established and are now part of a method that is no longer theoretical. Every topic – quality, efficiency, planning, marketing – of the service has been improved. Unintended but welcome benefits are the increased awareness of many consultants of the basics of patent information, and the lower threshold keeping them from integrating patent search in their projects. On top of this horizontal dissipation of knowledge, the knowledge of the Sirris IP community deepens and has become a pool of technical experts from which may appear excellent patent information specialists. In fact one of them – having already attended Search Matters 2011 [8] – will follow a specialised introductory course for nascent patent information specialists [9]. We can with confidence conclude that we currently have in place a collaborative model, that provided the points of attention are well taken care of and all necessary resources are brought to bear, in coming years will boost our capacity and quality of patent information research.