SBIR Phase I: Project to Create a Machine Intelligence-based System for Innovative Organizations to Assess, Manage and License Intellectual Property

This SBIR Phase I project proposes to help unleash America's stock of intellectual property, converting ideas into products, services and therapies to benefit humanity. Using advanced machine-intelligence techniques, semantic-networking technologies and semantic-based visualization to extract meaning and context from the current, relatively unstructured data set of issued patents stands to significantly enhance the nation's understanding of intellectual property that has been developed and, importantly, the relationships between patents and instances of newly-developed intellectual property. The proposed system could help identify other areas of innovation as well as areas where innovations have been underutilized. The stock of underutilized IP in America, and around the world, represents a significant loss of value to society. The system will also help to fuel future innovations by identifying open areas for innovation. An important benefit of the system is to make more widely known the opportunities for Federally funded, university-developed technologies to be licensed and put to use. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be to enhance Innovation in America. Spending on R & D and patent protection is significant and growing. Global annual R & D spending totaled over $1.333 Trillion in 2011 and annual U.S. spending on R & D was roughly 32% of the global total at $427 billion and is estimated at $436 billion for 2012. Innovative organizations investing in R & D invest roughly 3-4% of their R & D budget on patent expenses to protect that IP with an estimated U.S. IP expenditure of $17.44 billion in 2012. As part of this total, approximately 10% or $1.74B will be spent on the IP Information category that covers information about intellectual property. Of this category, an estimated 20% of the IP Information budget will be spent with Online IP Services, accessed specifically online, up from approximately 5% in 2003, resulting in a target market of $348.8 million for Online IP Services tools in 2012. This project, by enabling innovative organizations to visualize the context and competitive landscape of their intellectual property, will enable better choices and make it easier for IP to be licensed to enhance innovation in America.