AmberBlog

Last week's blog on the most influential patents in the 1980s was very well received by readers, and we thank you for the positive feedback.

But what were the dominant(most influential) patents of the 1990s? Which you will recall was the decade that saw the invention of the worldwide web, pentium processor, first HIV treatment and Java computer script.

Like last weeks list, this list of the dominant patents of the 1990s has been compiled using our AmberScore patent scoring system, which assesses patents based on their position within the patent network. AmberScore values can be quickly and assessed for individual patents in our AmberScope patent search system. Bulk AmberScore data for the likes of portfolio analysis can be obtained by contacting Ambercite. 

1) Leading this list was US5143854 Large scale photolithographic solid phase synthesis of polypeptides and receptor binding screening thereof, filed by Affymax of Palo Alto in 1990. According to Espacenet, US5143854 has 55 backward citations and 1384 forward citations, and we calculated that AmberScore value of 151 (or 151 times the influence of the average granted US patent less than 20 years old). 

This fascinating technology is for screening biological agents such as antibodies and cells so that biochemists can identify them.

The process begins with attaching one end of specific molecules to a substrate. At the other end of these molecules are 'photo-removable' groups. Light is selectively focused onto these 'photo-removable groups', which removes them. A monomer can be washed over the substrate which then joints to the molecule, creating an engineered polymer. This molecule can also include a photo-removable group, allowing the process to be repeated with a second monomer, and so on. Different locations of the substrate can be built up with different polymers in a matrix type arrangement.

Once the substrate can be manufactured with the engineered polymers (and a range of engineered polymers can be added at a matrix of different locations), the substrate can be use to screen different biological agents such as anti-bodies cells etc, which adhere to the different locations of the substrates depending on their exact chemical compositions. In this way, the agents can be analysed and screened. 

Affymax appear to be using this technology as part of a discovery platform based on advanced recombinant peptide and peptide chemistry techniques that has been used to generate novel peptide alternatives to protein drugs

2) In second place is US5643826 (1994) Method for manufacturing a semiconductor device, filed by Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) of Japan. US5643826 has 15 backward citations, 1100 forward citations and an AmberScore value of 142.

This patent covers A process for fabricating a highly stable and reliable semiconductor, comprising: coating the surface of an amorphous silicon film with a solution containing a catalyst element capable of accelerating the crystallization of the amorphous silicon film, and heat treating the amorphous silicon film thereafter to crystallize the film.

In practice, this is done by adding very small amounts (less than 200 ppm) of a metal such as nickel into the solution to promote the crystallization.

As a matter of interest , SEL is majority owned by Shunpei Yamazaki.

Mr Yamazaki has been previously mentioned in the pages of this blog, being the second leading global inventor in terms of patents filed with over 11,000 patents listed in Espacenet (only beaten by an Australian), even if he is not listed as an inventor on this patent. SEL is also of note being a company founded back in 1980 purely to develop and licence IP (as opposed to manufacturing), and so being a lot earlier into this field than many companies who have adopted a similar corporate strategy such as Intellectual Ventures. 

3) In third place is a very different invention, being US5111638 Method for wrapping an object with a material having pressure sensitive adhesive thereon, filed by Highland Supply Corporation in 1991. US5111638 has 42 backward citations, a 'mere' 452 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 136.  

In simple terms, this patent covers wrapping the likes of a flowers in a pot with a sheet covered or partially covered with pressure sensitive adhesive, and where the sheet adheres to either the pot, or the material that it overlaps.

On first impression, this seems an unlikely candidate for a top 10 patents of the 1990s list, even if the claims are quite broad. But there are good reasons for this inclusion.

This patent was invented by Donald Weder, who also made the list of leading patent filers blog, in 7th place (and in fact the USPTO have placed Weber as the US's leading inventor by combining his design and standard patents, ahead of Thomas Edison, whilst our top filers blog only referred to standard patents). Weber's family company Highland Supply Corporation of Illinois claims to supply over 12,000 products to the floricultural industry, and to be the world's leading supplier of floral packaging solutions.

An analysis of the forward cites to this patent, as well as an AmberScope analysis, has confirmed that this patent sits near a centre of a large and tight cluster of related patents, the vast majority also invented by Weder. Being at the centre of a large and tight cluster will boost the AmberScore value of a patent compared to patents with the same number of forward citations, but where these citations are not connected to each other. This explains the high AmberScore value for a comparatively low number of forward citations.

4) Continuing the no doubt very surprising floral theme is the 4th ranked patent US5523520 Mutant dwarfism gene of petunia, filed by Goldsmith Seeds Inc. in 1994, and now owned by Sygenta. US5523520 has just 3 backward citations, 1787 forward citations and an AmberScore value of 131. 

Why would dwarf petunias have attracted so much attention? Sygenta claims to be one of the largest wholesale breeders of hybrid flowers in the world. But the real reason may be that it was one of the first genetically engineered commercial plants, hence just the 3 backward patent citations compared to its 1787 forward citations. A review of the forward citations showed that the company with the most forward citations is Monsanto, with over 800 forward citations from patents covering genetically engineered variants of a broad variety of plants, ranging from soya beans to cotton.

5) Electrical engineers will no doubt be pleased that the reminder of the patents in this list are all concerned with ICT. In 5th position is US5172338 Multi-state EEprom read and write circuits and techniques to Sundisk Corporation of California (1990). This patent has 9 backward citations, 1049 forward citations and an AmberScore value of 120.

Electrical engineers would also recognise that an 'EEPROM refers to a predecessor of the solid state memory that stores data in modern smartphones and tablets, as well as USB memory sticks. The improvement claimed in this patent is the ability to store information in each memory cell in more than one 'state' of information (voltage level), so improving the amount of data that could be stored.

6) In 6th position is US5177567  Thin-film structure for chalcogenide electrical switching devices and process therefor, filed by Energy Conversion Devices in July 1991, and now owned by Ovonyx of Michigan. US5177567 has 6 backward citations, 513 forward citations and an AmberScore value of 115. 

This patent claims an improved structure of an alternative type of solid state memory based upon the alternating physical state of chalcogenides (a type of chemical compound). These types of flash memory are known as phase change memory, in which the chalcogenides can be either set to be in an amorphous (non-crystalline) state with high electrical resistance, or in a crystalline state with low electrical resistance. Hence data can be stored via its state of electrical resistance. The claims of this patent are focused on the structure of the cell, in particular the layout of the insulation material shown in positions 2 and 6 in the figure below, which surround the central body ofchalcogenide shown in position 3.

Ovonyx was founded in 1999 to commercialise phase change flash memory as originally invented by Stanley Ovshinsky of Energy Conversion Devices, who are thought to be the world's largest manufacturers of flexible solar cells. Phase Change memory is attractive to the ICT industry because it promise the potential of very fast programming time, although its temperature sensitivity is a known drawback.

7) Another EEPROM patent is in 7th place, namely US6011725  Two bit non-volatile electrically erasable and programmable semiconductor memory cell utilizing asymmetrical charge trapping,  filed by Saifun Semiconductors (now Spansion) in 1999. US6011725 has 45 backward citations, 956 forward citations, an AmberScore value of 111, and claims an innovative structure for an EEPROM that speeds up the rate that it can be read and erased. 

8) In lucky number 8th position is US5848932  Method of playing game and gaming games with an additional payout indicator, filed by Anchor Gaming in 1997 and now owed by IGT. US5848932 has 18 backward citations, 724 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 110. This invention covers a slot machine with an additional payout indicator controlled by mechanical means, such as the dial shown at the top of the slot machine below. Bonus payouts are now a very common feature of such slot machines, providing an additional incentive for punters to keep playing.

9) In 9th position is US5661506 Pen and paper information recording system using an imaging pen , filed by SIA Technology in 1994. US5661506 has 34 backward citations, 1231 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 109.

This invention covers a system for writing on a piece of paper covered with a pre-recorded pattern of pixels, invisible from the naked eye. A small camera on a pen records the position of the pen via these 'invisible' markings and passes this position back to a computer which is able to record the markings being made on the paper.

This is a predecessor  of the so-called smart pen which is commonly used by graphic designers and other users of computers. One example of this is the LiveScribe pen, which in turn is based on Anoto intellectual property, which appears to be very similar to the SIA invention. The most cited patent in the Anoto patent portfolio is US5852434, which has an AmberScore of 95, enough for it to appear in 18th position on this same list (and a second Anoto patent appears in 21st position).

10) And completing the list of top 10 patents is another patents from Energy Conversion Devices (now owned by Ovonyx), namely US5166758 Electrically erasable phase change memory which was filed in January 1991. US5166758 has 6 backward citations, 536 forward citations and an AmberScore value of 108. This claims a different aspect of the concept discussed in the later filed #6 ranked patent, namely the broad concept of using change in cell electrical resistance to store data in solid state memory, as opposed to changes in cell voltage as discussed by the #5 ranked patent in our list.

And positions 11 to 20?  These include patents for surgical implants, e-commerce, wireless data transfer, semiconductors, smartphone and more patents for solid state memory. 

Discussion - the value of AmberScore.

This review of the most domianant of the 1990s has perhaps produced a few surprises. Some of the inventions should not surprise, such as inventions in the areas of improved medical diagnostics, solid state memory (essential for the battery life achievable in modern smartphones and tablet computers), genetically engineered plants, and gaming machines which have become ubiquitous in many countries. Other patents in this list might surprise, such an invention for floral wrap.

So what does this tell you about the value of AmberScore? AmberScore is a guide to highly connected patents. Highly connected patents indicate areas of high patent density, which in turn should suggest areas of high commercial potential, as applicants will typically only file patents in areas that they think could make them money. As with other 'predictions' of the future, the potential may not work out, or take longer than expected to bear fruit. An analogy can be drawn with the crowd favourite at horse races or indeed any other expression of the wisdom of crowds - while not a guarantee of success, such favourites are well worth looking at.

In some cases, the potential may have been realised by other companies. For example the dwarf petunia patent by itself may not have created a lot of value, but was the forerunner of Monsanto's significant business with genetically engineered plants such as roundup ready soybean. Similarly while we have no direct evidence that the SIA patent has been commercialised, the very similar patent filed by Anoto has been commercialised by LiveScribe and possibly other companies.

In other cases, the IP may have been licensed out to other companies, such as the Semiconductor Energy Laboratory patent for an improved semi-conductor, or may yet to be successfully commercialised despite clear potential, such as the inventions for a phase change memory.

Another observation is that these patents all have a small number of backward citations compared to a very large number of forward citations, suggesting that they were ground-breaking patents in their field.

And this shows the value of AmberScore. It is not designed to replace the normal commercial and legal evaluation of the value of a technology or a patent. But it does suggest where to start looking for such value, which can be very helpful when faced with a large portfolio of patents to consider, and without the time and resources to look individually at all of these patents.

Remember the 1980’s? Big hair and Duran Duran? The 1980’s was also the era of the invention of MS-DOS, the Apple Macintosh, Windows, the first cellphones, and Prozac. But what were the leading patents from this era?

Users of AmberScope should be familiar with AmberScore, our patent ranking system. AmberScore considers such factors as as the number of forward and backward citations, the strengths of the citation connections, the age of the patent and the number of recent forward citations to come up with an overall score for the influence of the patent. AmberScore values are normalised as well, in such a way so that the average granted US patent less than 20 years old has an AmberScore value of 1.0 So an AmberScore value of 2 for a US patent is twice as good as the average granted patent, and so on.

AmberScore is based on our experience of ranking patents using Network Patent Analysis, and considering the limitation of other means of ranking patents. It is designed to be a simple to use and easy to understand predictor of patent quality.

In a three part series of blogs, we will consider the 10 most influential patents of each of the three last decades in order to illuminate some of the key technology trends over this period (note that in this top 10 list, we will exclude family members from a patent already in this list). So what were the top ten patents from the 1980s?

1) Leading our list (and in fact with the highest AmberScore value in our entire database) is US4733665 "Expandable intraluminal graft, and method and apparatus for implanting an expandable intraluminal graft" (filed 1985), originally filed by Expandable Grafts Partnership. This patent covers an expandable graft which can be used to dilate blocked blood vessels and so help deal with the consequences of heart disease. US4733665 has an AmberScore value of 347, which may reflect its 26 backward citations and 2,174 forward citations.

2) In second position is US4800159, Process for amplifying, detecting, and/or cloning nucleic acid sequences (1986). This patent is concerned with genetic engineering, and has just 3 backward citations, 1003 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 206. Originally filed by Cetus Corporation, its last  listed owner is Roche Molecular Systems.

3) In third position, with an AmberScore value of 176, is US4886062 Intravascular radially expandable stent and method of implant  (1987), to Medtronic.  This is another device for unblocking blood vessels. This patent had 12 backward citations and has 1237 forward citations.

4) Heart disease was clearly a big focus in the 1980s, because the 4th most influential patent was US4800882 to Cook Incorporated, Endovascular stent and delivery system (1987), which refers to a wire stent used for clearing blood vessels. This patent has 12 backward citations and 1237 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 167.

5) But this is not the only Cook Incorporated patent for a stent in the top ten list, as in 5th position in US4580568, covering a Percutaneous endovascular stent and method for insertion thereof (1984). This patent has 9 backward citations and 1144 forward citations, and a AmberScore value of 164.

7) The last of the stent related patents in this top ten list is US4655771 Transluminally placed expandable graft prosthesis (1983). Originally filed by Charles Dotter and now owned by Cook Corporation, this patent has 11 backward citations, 898 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 158.

8) Moving from stents (I learnt more than than I ever suspected I would know about stents after writing the above section), in 8th position is US4799156 to Strategic Processing Corporation, which is for an Interactive market management system (1986). Essentially, this is a patent for e-commerce, including the ability to run multiple transactions in parallel, a central system and validation process. This patent has 10 backward citations, 1400 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 137.

9) Genetic engineering re-enters this list in 9th position, via US4816567, Recombinant immunoglobin preparations (1983), filed by Genentech. As readers would recognise, a 'recombinant immunoglobin' is a genetically modified antibody, with many potential applications in treating diseases. This patent has 8 backward citations and 2425 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 135.

10) And in 10th position is something is a patent for something that many of us might have at home, namely an inkjet printer. US4740796 to Canon covers Bubble jet recording method and apparatus in which a heating element generates bubbles in multiple liquid flow paths to project droplets (1986), or the process of creating the droplets printed onto paper in inkjet printing. This patent has 14 backward citations and 1944 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 134.

So there is the final list - Six patents for inventions related to clearing blocked blood vessels, two for genetic engineering, and a patent each for e-commerce and an inkjet printer. As a matter of interest, the next 10 patents include more patents for stents, but also patents for securities trading, semi-conductors and a further patent for genetic engineering. But as will be seen in Part 2, the equivalent list for the 1990s sees a big move towards the electronic age - including a patent for a slot machine.

Appendum - Relationship between AmberScore and forward citation count

Sharp eyed readers would have noted that these patents all had very high forward citation counts, which is used as an indicator of patent quality by many analysts. However there was not a perfect correlation, with the 9th and 10th ranked patents having the highest and third highest forward citation count respectively. Readers might ask:

1. How can this be?, and;
2. Why not just use forward citation count as a patent quality indicator?

If we answer these questions in reverse, there does seem to be a shared view among many patent analysts that while forward citation count is important, by itself forward citation count is not a complete measure. Other analysts supplement forward citation count with other measures such as those based on: 

• prosecution measures such as the number of family members, renewal history etc
• litigation measure, such as whether the patent have been litigated
• internal measures, such as the number of inventors, breadth of patent codes.

Each of these measures has their limitations, such as

• prosecution measures can be affected by corporate decisions more to do with commercial strategy than patent quality
• litigation measures can be limited in that many high quality patents are not litigated - competitors may recognise a good patent when they see one, and just keep away from it
• internal measures may only have a weak correlation with patent quality

Based on significant experience with NPA studies, Ambercite instead prefers to use advanced network measures (such as AmberScore), which take into account forward and backward citations, and the citations to these citations etc. This based on the model that influential and important patents are not only connected to many patents, but many of its connections are connected to other influential patents, and many of these connections are strong - all of this reflecting a patent area of high concentration ('patent thicket') and hence high likely value.

Or in people terms, it is not just how many professional contacts you have, but how strong these connections are and who these people are connected to.

And this helps explain why AmberScore did not rank the top ten patents in the same order as forward citation count - it is not just how many people you know, but how well you know them, and how up to date your friendships are.

Would you like to use Amberscore to predict the influence of patents you are interested in? Further details of how to use AmberScore are found here.

All of us like to think that we are rational thinkers, so it was great to read the recently published bestseller "Thinking Fast and Slow" by the Isreali/American winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman explores in a very interesting and readable way a whole list of reasons why our thinking and decision is so often flawed, and I would recommend this book to anyone.

One of the more thought provoking parts of the book was the dangers and limitations of experts.  According to Kahneman, experts (and all of us probably think we are experts) have their place, but this place needs to be recognised, namely in peforming reasonably repetitive tasks where the rest of us benefit from their experience and underlying knowledge. For this reason we visit a doctor for an operation, and employ a patent attorney to draft a patent.

However experts can also suffer from over-confidence, and in some tests have been shown to perform worse than non-experts (particularly crowds of non-experts), particular where they rely on their intuition (the underlying theme of the book is that intuition is not the same thing as thinking - and in fact can give you misleading outcomes). But this tendency to use intuition can be reduced though the use of even rudimentary formulas or algorithms when making expert assessments, as this helps structure your thinking.

When reading this part of the book, I was reminded of a typical competition judging sheet. Judges might be asked to rate contestants on a series of categories, and then the categories scores are added up and perhaps weighted - as opposed to the judges simply picking a favourite contestant. By introducing this simple algorithm, any subconscoius bias in the judge is reduced and the most worthy contestant is more likely to be chosen.

So how does this relate to patents? Part of the role of an (expert) patent analyst is assessing patents, and this can be a very complex task. But according to Kahneman, the provision of formulas or algorithms may help matters as it helps us think about patents in a more structured manner. This may be one reason why many analysts use forward citation count to help them assess patent quality and importance, perhaps with other criteria such as family size, along with some other measures. Here at Ambercite we are developing an alternative predictor of patent quality, namely patent influence, which we believe is superior to forward citation or family size count. But regardless, we would suggest that any reasonable numerical predictor of patent quality, including forward citation count, is probably better than no measure at all, particularly if this means that the 'expert' ends up relying on their unstructured inituition instead.

Ambercite was honoured to be invited to present on NPA at the Patent Statistics, Innovation management and IPR Conference in Paris, held on the 5th of June 2012. I presented Network Patent Analysis and foreshadowed our upcoming new products for the first time to a European audience.

The conference also included a number of presentations on the role of patents in the ICT space. Jim Bessen from the Boston University School of Law in his presentation Patents and Possible failures in the Digital World argued the net effects of patents in the ICT space was negative, as the value destroyed due to the effects of patents was greater than the value created through higher profits. Simon Forge from SCF Associates in his presentation "The Tragedy of the Patent" argued that Europe had an opportunity to steal a march on US companies due to the exclusion of business method and software patents in Europe.

The counterview was provided by Claudia Tapia Garcia from RIM, Monica Magnusson from Ericsson, and George Whitten from Qualcomm, including in a panel discussion.  Perhaps the most thought provoking of these presentations was a presentation from Monica Magnusson and about how the 3G Partnership Project (3G for the rest of us) mobile broadband standard works. A series of working committees decide areas of improvement for 3G, and the various companies working in this area are invited to develop competing solutions. The engineers on these working committees then evaluate these solutions , and pick a winner based on technical merit, and make this solution part of the now revised standard. Successful vendors are required to make their solution available to all comers on the now almost infamous Friendly, Reasonable And Non Discriminatory (FRAND) conditions, and one suspects that peer pressure helps to ensure that licenses are indeed FRAND.

The role of patents in this process is provide participants with a currency for exchange during these negotiations, and means of ensuring that the successful developers are rewarded for their effort, and not surprisingly Qualcomm, Ericsson and RIM all defended that patent system for this reason. In their view, the current increase in patent litigation in the ICT space, and complaints about 'patent trolling', are all a healthy and to-be-expected outcome from the patent system.

Regardless, one of the representatives of the above companies then admitted in discussions afterwards that their company does sued on a regular basis by other patent holders, but prefers to deal with such assertions by defending itself in courts where it has been quite successful, and was starting to build up a reputation for being so. This representative's key observation was that there are many patents of dubious quality out there, and this may be part of the cause of the recent trend in litigation.

And there may be a lot of truth in this. Allison, Lemley and Walker have shown that only 9.2% of patents asserted by Non Practicing Entities (NPE) eventually win their cases in US courts. This is lower than the 46% figure commonly quoted for all US patent litigation (and dating from 1998, and so which may be out of date). However the recent litigation between the Practicing Entities Apple and Google has seen just 5 out of the 21 patents (a little under 25%) originally asserted survive review by the Judge Posner.

The reason for some of these high patent invalidity rates may due to the difficulty of searching for prior art patents during their initial examination. Current patent searching practices do have significant limitations (including having to read through long lists of patents to find the patents you might be looking for), and this has encouraged Ambercite to apply its Network Patent Analysis principles to develop a new method to improve patent searching. The results of this development are being finalized at the moment, and we look forward to demonstrating this in due course.

I have previously written a blog article on patent quality, and covered various aspects of patent quality in other blogs. I have also been lucky enough to have had many discussions with other people about what patent quality is, both online and in person. This includes recent discussions at the "Patent statistics, innovation management and IPR" conference in Paris last week, for which I will separately report on. And over these discussions, a greater understanding of patent quality is starting to emerge, namely that:

When we think about it, this should not be that surprising. The view of the quality of a particular patent may be very different if you are patent owner, licensee, licensor, potential infringer, follow on inventor or ligitator. Even a litigator may have a different view of patent quality depending on the alleged infringing product. 

Another definition of quality is given by ISO 8402-1986, which defines quality as "the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs", which is a long winded way of saying "fitness for purpose". The same could easily apply to patent quality.

Here at Ambercite, we have defined a measure of patent quality, based on where a patent sits within a network of its peers. However given that patent quality is dependant on its purpose, and different people have different purposes, it may have been a bit ambitious to claim that our ranking system was a measure of patent quality per se - because how can we claim to measure something that means different things to different people?

For this reason, we will from now on refer to the results of our patent ranking system as the relative patent 'influence'. We have chosen the word 'infuence' because the highest ranked patents do have the most influence in the patent network. And regardless of the name change, we remain proud of the ability of patent influence to be a more than useful predictor of patent quality (however quality is defined) , as evidenced by how Network Patent Analysis (NPA) was able to identify the:

• key patent for the promising phase III bapineuzumab as the highest ranked (in terms of influence) patent in our study of 48,000 patents for Alzheimer's treatments, despite its low forward citation count
• relative importance of the highest ranked patent US7,663,607 in the smartphone patent wars white paper, as confirmed by leading smartphone patent wars commentator Florian Mueller.
• the importance of the successfully litigated Paice patents in our study of 72,000 hybrid car patents.

So what does this means for patent analysts and our clients? We still stand by everything we have done and said to date, apart from this change in terminology.

However this does help clarify our value proposition for patent analyst and potential clients who may be using other metrics to define patent quality. Just like a doctor might use multiple tests to determine the health of a patient, we would recommend that our 'patent influence' test may provide a unique and very valuable perspective on the 'health' of the patents they are reviewing that may be missed by other techniques.

If you were relying on your doctor's advice for your health, would you want them to base this advice on incomplete data? No? In that case, why would you accept incomplete metrics for what may be a financially significant decision in the patent space?

Please contact us to find out how we can help you understand the full picture (literally in our case, unlike some of our competitors) on patent quality and value.