Patent World
IP managers have to be able to understand patent and law related topics and discuss them in detail with the patent attorney, or propose argumentation for an office action.
Features
Discover all features of Patent Cockpit here. For each feature you'll find a brief overview, a practical guide on how to use it effectively, and helpful tips for everyday work.
IP Management
Product World
But they also need to understand the products — how they function, how they evolve over time, and which market segments they serve, or which countries are important for those products. So it ranges from product management to R&D topics. And you have to understand the technology in depth to be able to see what can be patented, or whether the patent still holds for that product.
Business World
IP managers also need to be able to explain to their management what the costs are for, and how the IP portfolio is growing and creating value for the company.
IP management
Patent Cockpit was built to gather all relevant information from totally different "worlds" and present it in an understandable way. The key is that everyone in the organization can truly understand the basis for decision-making.
Getting started
Meet regularly
Arrange regular meeting with product management, R&D, the one responsible on c-level. Also if there are no urgent topics, you will learn releavnt information.
Patent Journeys
Patent attorneys are often exceptionally good at what they do — and also fairly expensive. So avoid letting them spend time on tasks outside their area of expertise. You can ask them to focus on what they truly do best: drafting and defending patents.
Tips
- Always use the language of the world you are currently in.
- See yourself as an interpreter between worlds.
- Collect and appropriately translate and display information.
- Have office actions forwarded to you uncommented. An internal discussion or an AI review quickly shows whether a deeper analysis is even needed.
Portfolio development
Current state of affairs
Patent Cockpit shows the IP rights that are currently in your portfolio.
Evolution of your portfolio
This chart shows how you arrived at your current portfolio — the new IP rights you filed, the ones you stopped, and the resulting portfolio.
What does the future hold?
The new families chart shows when the new families were created (periods of high innovation) as well as the expiry dates of those families. The latter is, for example, critical when IP rights are licensed out or protect important products.
Tips
- Make sure all active cases have a priority date and an expiry date set.
- All stopped cases should have a priority date and an abandonment date to show how the portfolio evolved.
Understand the scope of protection
Everything starts with the real scope of protection
Decisions on nationalizations, renewal fee payments, evaluations, and use of resources depend on what is actually protected.
An image and a summary explain the scope
In order for everyone to truly grasp the scope of protection, we work with a representative image and a concise summary that together explain the scope of protection of patents, trademarks, or designs.
This is the basis for real understanding
In this way anybody can understand the true protective scope in seconds, for example when taking decisions.
Getting started
Make the summary
Summarize the true scope of protection. For patents, take the independent claims and condense them to 20-30 words. For trademarks, name the most important classes and goods and services. For designs, describe the most relevant design aspects.
Pick a relevant image
Pick an image that shows what is really protected.
Better decision making
The summary and image are used throughout the software, for example when decisions need to be made about renewal fees.
Tips
- Use the summary and image whenever communicating with people in your organisation.
- Update the summary and image whenever the scope changes in a way that is significant for properly understanding the protective scope.
- Use colors in the image to make features easier to identify.
- For trademarks, list the most important products and services. For designs, list the most distinctive feature.
Keep costs under control
What costs have been incurred?
Record all IP-related costs and analyze by family, year, cost center, or other criteria to understand where the budget went.
What costs are coming up?
Patent Cockpit automatically forecasts your costs for the years ahead. Test different scenarios to see which one best serves your goals.
Getting started
Automated cost overview
Patent Cockpit automatically shows the costs that have accumulated over the last few years, so you can see at a glance where the budget has gone.
Set the filter
Use the filter to focus on the data you need — by family, country, cost center, or year.
Adaptability
Based on the filter settings, your cost views and forecasts adapt automatically to the slice of the portfolio you are looking at.
Tips
- Make sure all costs are entered into the system.
- Use cost centers so you can analyse spending across the dimensions that matter to your business.
- Create a scenario that resembles your vision, or scenarios to evaluate what is doable. See scenarios for how to create scenarios.
Patent usage
How are the patents used?
This chart shows how many of your patents are actually used.
How are the patents used?
This chart shows how many of your patents are actually used.
What income is protected
A more powerful assessment of how well patents are used is the income they protect.
Financial contribution
Combining an evaluation score with the protected turnover is a very good indication of the value of a patent.
Document management
Integrated document storage
Patent Cockpit has integrated document storage and a powerful search function. Contracts, emails, drawings, and office actions can be imported with drag and drop.
Accessible via Windows Explorer
All documents are also accessible via Windows Explorer, so they can be opened, edited, and saved directly in Windows — no cumbersome check-in/check-out required.
Save on renewals
Reduce maintenance costs
Thanks to our partners (Dennemeyer and Patent Renewal), users typically save 100 EUR or more per maintenance fee by handling renewal fee payments directly inside Patent Cockpit. Book an appointment to learn how much you can save.
All decision-making information at a glance
All the relevant information is displayed when decisions are made, leading to more sustainable decisions and cost savings.
Getting started
Ask for help
Send us the list of IP rights you pay renewal fees for. We will prepare a cost estimate for the coming years so you can compare it with your current invoices and see how much you may be able to save.
Establish a review meeting
Set up a regular renewal review with all relevant stakeholders. In Patent Cockpit, every renewal-relevant detail is in one place — open the renewal page during the meeting, work through the upcoming cases together, decide which fees to pay, add comments where needed, and record the decision on the spot.
Tips
- Do the calculation: The number of maintenance fees you pay per year x €100. That's what you may be able to save!
- Want a deeper look at how renewal fees work across countries? Our partner Patent Renewal maintains a clear overview of renewal fees.
Custom reporting
Pick the data you want
With our intuitive Data Wizard, you simply choose the fields and figures you want in your custom IP report. By applying a portfolio filter beforehand, you define precisely which IP rights, products, or business units the report covers.
Save your assessments
These assessments can be created and stored for later use, so you don't have to repeat the same tasks over and over again.
Group by category
Data can be grouped by different categories depending on what you need. Grouping by product, for example, shows all data in relation to the products.
Export to Excel
Once the assessment has been done, the results can be exported to Excel for further use or dissemination in the organization.
Getting started
Make sure your data is complete
Before you build a report, confirm that all relevant IP data has been entered into Patent Cockpit. A report is only as accurate as the underlying portfolio.
Open a new query
Start a new query in the Data Wizard and pick the fields you want in your report — costs, dates, statuses, owners, or any other data you have captured.
Choose how to group the results
Group by IP right for case-level detail, by patent family for a consolidated cross-country view, by product to see what each product is protected by, or by invention to follow disclosures end to end.
Tips
- Keep your portfolio data complete — every report is only as good as the underlying data.
- Save queries you run often, such as monthly cost reports or board updates, so you don't have to rebuild them each time.
- Use the column filters in the table header to narrow a report down to exactly the IP rights, products or families you need.
Departments, BUs and groups
Group IP rights by institute, department, BU, owner, etc.
Reflect your organizational structure in the portfolio so each unit can see the IP that is relevant to them.
Assign custom tags for flexible grouping
Use tags for cross-cutting topics — technologies, programs, strategic themes — that do not fit a single hierarchy.
Analyses of subgroups
Run costs, forecasts, and evaluations on any subgroup so decisions can be made at the right level.
Getting started
Decide how to group your portfolio
Think about how you want to group your IP rights. You can set up several overlapping groupings and switch between them depending on the analysis or report you need.
Organisational structure
Assign your IP rights to business units, departments, institutes, or other organisational entities so each team can see the IP that is relevant to them.
Technical field
Group your IP rights by technical field as well — for example, distinguishing methods from devices, or electrical from mechanical components — so you can analyse your portfolio along the lines of your R&D structure.
Employee inventions act
Track invention disclosures
Capture invention disclosures with all the data needed for legal claiming, internal evaluation, and follow-up.
Manage compensation
Calculate inventor compensation and participation shares, and keep the history of payments and decisions in one place.
Forecast scenarios
Forecast
Patent Cockpit comes with an integrated forecasting tool. But since a significant part of IP management is about reacting to changing circumstances, a forecast alone is often not enough.
Scenarios
That is why users can define different scenarios and see how costs would develop under each of them over the coming years. Comparing scenarios helps you find the best way to save while keeping the best possible protection.
Getting started
Pick a start date
Choose the year your forecast should start from. The forecast always runs from 1 January through 31 December of that year.
Save your scenarios
Create multiple forecast scenarios and compare how they develop. Save them so you can revisit and refine them later.
Filtering
Getting the data you want
Patent Cockpit has an integrated filtering function, so that you can only work with the data that you need in that moment.
Pick what you want
Choosing relevant countries will make Patent Cockpit work only with data from these countries.
Up-to-date charts
Wherever you go in Patent Cockpit, this filter will be applied. So your Cockpit charts will be up to date, as well as the data you select in your Data Wizard.
User friendliness
Everyone can use Patent Cockpit immediately
No onboarding is required. IP managers, assistants, R&D teams and business managers can use Patent Cockpit straight away.
Functionality that IP managers need
Patent Cockpit offers the functionality that IP managers need: portfolio overview, portfolio assessment tools, cost tracking, forecast and a cockpit with KPIs.
All data accessible in just a few clicks
Open any IP right and the relevant context is right there: bibliographic data, documentation, costs, inventors, owners, expiry date, score, the products it protects, etc, etc.