Essential to understanding your portfolio, is to understand changes in your portfolio over time. Beyond merely counting the size of your portfolio as patents are granted and expired, you also need to consider other accumulation and growth patterns: velocity, momentum, claim quality, claim scope, geographic coverage (international), patent duration, patent analytics and patent fences or thickets. Using our patent search tools, such analyses are easy to do. Let IPstreet.com help you today.

Conducting a thorough patent search is difficult, particularly for the novice. Patent searching is a learned skill. A novice in the United States could contact the nearest Patent and Trademark Depository Library (PTDL) and seek out search experts to help in setting up a search strategy.

There are three types of different patents (1) Utility Patents: Issued for the invention of a new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or a new and useful improvement thereof, it generally permits its owner to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention for a period of up to twenty years from the date of patent application filing ++, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. Approximately 90% of the patent documents issued by the USPTO in recent years have been utility patents, also referred to as "patents for invention." (2) Design Patents: Issued for a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture, it permits its owner to exclude others from making, using, or selling the design for a period of fourteen years from the date of patent grant. Design patents are not subject to the payment of maintenance fees. (3). Plant Patents: Issued for a new and distinct, invented or discovered asexually reproduced plant including cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state, it permits its owner to exclude others from making, using, or selling the plant for a period of up to twenty years from the date of patent application filing. Plant patents are not subject to the payment of maintenance fees.

"At the heart of any successful organization there is the recognition that only through the firm's talent will it acheive its objectives. With that in mind, the talent management organization's role is to align its strategy for acquiring, managing and developing talent to the business' strategic objectives. Business leaders want to assist with this goal. According to the Aberdeen Group, the top priority in 2011 for best-in-class companies is aligning their business and talent strategy." (Facteau and Hall, July 2011, talent management TM). Let the patent search tools at IPstreet.com help you identify key assets.

The Japanese commissioner in Washington DC in the 1900's studying the American patent system said, "We have looked about us to see what nations are the greatest, so that we can be like them... We said, 'What makes the United States such a great nation?' and we investigated and found that it was patents, and we will have patents."