The filing activity of companies gives strong insights on their IP and R&D effort.
Comparing different companies patent portfolios and trends of their filings over time is a great way to get an overview of the competitive landscape. Just comparing numbers, i.e amount of patents for a given company, does not say that much. To instead visualize this data gives you a whole new picture.
The Filing Activity plot shows patent filings over time for the full data of the selected portfolio or a sub-set of data (i.e. whole data set/certain assignee/several assignees). The time domain (x-axis) is related to the priority year, i.e. the year of first filing. The filings over time give the user an insight to R&D focus/commitment of the specific company. For example, have they recently started to become active in this area, or have they been active for several years? Observed changes may require an additional analysis to interpret the reasons for the change. It also offers the possibility to forecast patenting trends.
This plot gives the user an overview of the number of patent families filed over time per assignee. The activity can be presented by type (patent, utility model), status (pending, alive, dead), tags, or applicants. The default value is number of patent families per year. The user can also change the range on the x-axis by using the slider.
