Reference no: EM133418066

Case Study: This assignment focuses on using public patent filing data to evaluate the competitive landscape in a product segment. The goal is to determine who the major players are in a product segment and how much protection they have. Your company wants to enter the pressure support mask business. Pressure support masks are referred in respiratory therapy as a non-invasive "patient interface", that is, a device to connect a ventilator to a patient (as opposed to an invasive patient interface such as an endotracheal tube inserted down the throat). A general figure is provided below, the number 46 identifying the mask. We do not have a proposed design yet or even a decision as to whether the mask will cover just the mouth, just the nose or both, but your manager wants you to determine who our major competitors will be and how many patents they have in order to get an idea of how much work it will be to develop a non-infringing product. Profile image of person with mask over nose and mouth

Questions:

1. Using any patent search website (United States Patent and Trademark Office (uspto.gov). develop a search query that returns patents primarily on pressure support masks. Provide that search query and, recognizing that no search is perfect, how you determined it primarily covered masks.

2. Determine how many issued patents there are returned by your search query and how many new applications published in the last 12 months are returned by your search query (the USPTO search tool may be easiest for this).

3. From your results, identify at least five different companies that received patents for masks in the last decade and the number that they received (for the purposes of this exercise, treat related companies as a single entity, e.g., Coca-Cola, Inc., Coca-Cola UK pty, ltd. and Coca-Cola of Atlanta would all be the same entity).

4. For those five companies, determine how many issued patents each have received in total (not just mask patents) and create a distribution for the last five years (annually), i.e., 2017-2021.

5. Using the information gathered from the previous question, pick out the two companies with the most total patents. Identify how many patents (total, not just for masks) they received (issued) in last 12 months and how many new patent applications published in 2022. (Note that patent numbers are assigned sequentially by date).