10 most common pitfalls of patent research > 8. You use extended patent families
Consolidating your patent search results by INPADOC family can help you remove duplicate publications from your analysis, but the INPADOC family often does not provide an accurate invention-level analysis.
INPADOC families are assigned based on commonalities in priority claims. With divisionals, continuations, and continuations-in-part, this can result in an INPADOC family that includes patents covering multiple inventions. Additionally, INPADOC families will not include non-convention equivalents or patents from certain patent offices which do not transmit data to the EPO, such as India or Vietnam.
Analyzing invention families is helpful when trying to evaluate your competitor’s future direction and which inventions they’re most actively trying to protect.
With patent families, you’re also able to more accurately evaluate a company’s inventive output by measuring the number of new inventions (versus the number of new patent applications.)
Analyze patents at an invention-level. DWPI families include related non-convention equivalents (NCEs) and separate continuations-in-part that introduce new subject matter into new DWPI Families.
DWPI has categorized more than 100m global patents into 51.5m families to make it easy for you to search, sort, and see which invention-level families are most active in your technology domain.