What is Patentability or Novelty Search?

Novelty Search or Patentability Search is conducted when Inventors plan to file Patent or in the early stages of the invention. The main idea to conduct the searches is to determine whether Invention is patentable or not. This search is performed when an inventor is planning for applying for a patent and wants to know Novel aspect/Uniqueness, Inventive Step and Industrial Applicability of the invention or existence of similar invention around the world.

Remember, to successfully get your patent granted, your idea must be new, useful, non-obvious and have industrial applicability. You must be ready to defend your points of novelty, illustrate utility, and prove that your solution has not yet been conceived or discovered. Explain the aspects of utility by framing a case for enablement in your invention disclosure or patent application. Support the credibility of your novel claims and new discoveries with a thorough patentability search. As an inventor or assignee, your top priority is to secure protection for your intellectual property.

Avoid Costly Investment Decisions

Considering that filing a patent application is more expensive than conducting a patent search, going ahead with filing a patent application without knowing if the invention meets the requirements for patentability does not make business sense and could be wastage of time and huge money. It’s always better to find out early on that similar or identical inventions have already been patented. By analyzing the results of a patent search, inventors have the chance to hit the brakes and go back to the drawing board before it’s too late.
Patentability Search can be performed during the research & development of the invention, it is more commonly performed prior to submitting a patent application to check the existence prior art of similar invention around the World.

Improve the Patent Application Quality

By becoming more knowledgeable and familiar with the literature and non-literature available for the field of invention, you may also be able to then use this knowledge to their advantage. By implementing strategies and methods to improve their current design and consequently draft a stronger patent application. This is critical not only to increase the chances of having the patent granted easily but also to help to make it “litigation-proof” in the future.
Quite often, companies that want to invest in a technology that has already been patented, might bring the companies currently holding those rights into litigation, purposefully to get the patent reviewed and possibly, declared invalid.
If there is ever a dispute over whether a patent is being infringed upon, everything that the Patent and Trademark Office did in terms of granting a patent is then thoroughly reviewed, meaning that the original patentee could end up losing the patent.

Gain a Competitive Advantage

One of the most intriguing benefits of performing a patent search, as it applies to a broader scale, is investigating pending patent applications or existing patents. This activity can give the inventor useful insights into their competitor’s products or corporate strategies, thus making it easier to make decisions upon the venture’s future direction.
Technology maps (which can be created using data obtained through the patent search) are particularly useful in this sense since they can offer an accurate visualization of the competitor’s R&D expenditure and diversification.

It should be clear by now that patent search is an essential piece of the IP protection puzzle. One that, despite the initial investment, can save the inventor several headaches down the road. Furthermore, even if the inventor is an expert in their field, and they believe that their invention is original and unique, there are many great ideas that have been disclosed in patents, that are not yet well known.

To find out more about conducting a Novelty Search or Patentability Search, contact AnalystIP and get free consultation.

“Ideas in your mind have no patent value. They must be expressed or reduced to practice before it is too late” – Kalyan C. Kankanala, Fun IP, Fundamentals of Intellectual Property