مسیر یابی برای مراکز PATLIB اروپایی سودآور با یک مدل کسب و کار فرایند محور در خدمات مالکیت معنوی

Patent information centres in Europe (PATLIB) have to reorganise their business model because of the changing market situation for information services in Europe. It is shown, that the present approach only covers a small segment of the information service market and results in low accessible market volumes for PATLIB centres. Furthermore free-of-charge web-based patent information tends to result in difficulties to achieve cost covering prices for PATLIB services. The future PATLIB market situation can be summarised as expecting danger of reduced economic viability. Based on the specific PATLIB centre characteristics a redesign of business model is described. To generate a profitable future perspective it is necessary to focus on customer relationship marketing (CRM) for the main customer, respectively the business potential of small and medium enterprise (SME) environment. Six steps are proposed for the reorganisation into IP service centres. The first two steps are the orientation along the SME-customers IP value chain and a process oriented marketing approach. The next two steps are basic business models to meet the new process orientation. Finally the necessity and the arrangement of a tight European service network to offer top quality customer services and redesigned marketing activities is described.

The last years have seen a rapidly accelerated change in available patent information services. On the one hand, there is a dramatic change in information offered on the internet. Powerful service providers reach significant market shares with partially free-of-charge services. Therefore even less SMEs are willing to pay prices in the market of commercial customers which cover costs for retrieval and information services from highly educated specialists in the PATLIB centres. But in the last few years there is a complementary second pressure for PATLIB service structure. In a highly competitive business environment including complex intellectual property issues the customers needs business and process orientated support. The management wants to buy problem solving competence in favour of database ingenuity. Theses sustained trends, free-of-charge patent information and the need for problem solution on the customer side force the European PATLIB centres to redesign their business model for the commercial customer market in order to survive and ensure a probably profitable future. This paper shows a way to develop a new business model for PATLIB centres in a competitive environment for patent information services. The suggestions are based on an invited presentation given by the corresponding author at the PATLIB conference in Vilamoura, Portugal May 2004.

The PATLIB centres with their present configuration and business focus will lack an economic basis in the future. This is the conclusion reached by the analysis and expert estimated throughout this study. Basic reasons are the small accessible market share and low awareness of service benefits to the customer. This leads to low customer demand elasticity. Another significant reduction in potential prices that can be observed is seen in the market based on the increasing access to free-of-charge patent information on the Internet. To turn PATLIB centres into profit centres for intellectual property services a redesign of the marketing approach towards process oriented services is necessary. Elementary steps to valuable markets are the development of customer services based on patent information, network co-operation to gain quality benefits and focus on high return-on-investment for the customer.