We know how hard it is for a company to launch its product into the market. We see the company’s efforts in technology and investment to launch its product into the market. But what if the competitors and the company already claim product features came to know it at a dead end? How hard is it for a company to know that its product features infringe some other competitor’s patents? Canceling its product launch is not a good idea because of its millions of investment in developing it. This is why we recommend our clients to go for an FTO search when their product is still in R&D.

Let’s have a quick look at how many patent cases were filed in District Court and patents granted by the USPTO from 1998 to 2017.

We can see that patent cases have now dropped to the lowest level since 2011, while patent grants are growing continuously. It is only because of the FTO searches that clients opt for before launching a product into the market. Many IP firms help clients perform FTO searches, but we will explain why we are far ahead in this domain.

Our FTO Search Approach

For your understanding, we have conducted an exemplary FTO in the domain of camera-based Augmented Reality Tracking for industrial maintenance applications. We first understand the invention thoroughly and identify the product invention’s key features as given below.

The key features of the product invention are:

Our main aim is to find whether any competitor is claiming the client’s invention’s critical features. We first understand the invention thoroughly and comprehend whether the invention has any other application in any other field.
Once our team gets a clear idea of the invention and the scope of the invention, we will create comprehensive search strategies for finding patent references claiming the product features. We make different search strategies for the product invention’s specific features to ensure that even patent references with some product invention parts are a threat to it. We use many databases to find the best results.

Once we find the relevant references about the study’s scope, we map each feature of the product invention with the appropriate claims. Some of the results from our analysis on camera-based Augmented Reality Tracking for industrial maintenance applications are shown below.

Claim feature matrix of the relevant references:

Detailed mapping of relative patent references:

We also provide detailed legal status and Assignment history of each relevant reference. This detailed legal status will help the client know the references with a longer life as they are a bigger threat than the patents about to expire in the next one or two years.

We add many meaningful value-added insights along with the report. If you want to get the maximum benefit of your product invention before you launch it into the market, get in touch with us.