The patent search strategy has been carefully developed via several rounds of iteration. As a rule of thumb, it takes at least five years from invention to the first product on the market. In order to focus on the `hidden' R&D efforts which have not yet materialised as new products on the market, the initial study has been restricted to patents with a priority date from 2005. However because of a significant increase in the rate of patenting in this area, this initial patent portfolio contains over half of all patents with a priority from 1990 in this area.
About 2,800 original Assignee names from the original bibliographic records were combined into 200 Top Assignees. The proprietary de-duplication algorithm aggregated about 12,000 simple patent families from about 40,000 national patents. Only 3% of the patent families have been left unassigned and it was further found that about 12% of the patent portfolio is assigned to small players with fewer than one invention per year. The remaining 85% of the patent portfolio is assigned to about 250 companies with about 66% of the patent portfolio assigned to the top 50 companies in terms of patenting. Almost a hundred Patent Maps have been provided in the report to facilitate the detailed understanding of various aspects of the patent landscape.
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