Innography Comes of Age
Jinfo Blog

By Cathy Chiba

Abstract

Following her review of Innography and its key intellectual property products, Cathy Chiba considers the company's evolution and the value it offers its customers.

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It's been a big year for Innography. A maker of innovative intellectual property business intelligence solutions, Innography was the 2014 winner of two CODiE awards: Best Legal Information Solution and Best Service Using Aggregated Content.

Over the past several months, the company has seen record growth, exhibited at numerous conferences, and completed two major product enhancement cycles.

Even the summer has been busy: in July 2014, the company announced Patent Market Tracker, a new service that monitors the buying and selling of US patents, and three new professional assessment services.

Innography's Evolution

Jennifer Gallagher, a key sales engineer at Innography and my main technical contact during the writing of FreePint's review, told me she finds it useful to think of Innography as a person. 

In the early days, Jennifer told me, Innography was a like a baby: cute, precocious, with a few wonderful little tricks that made admirers ooh and ah. But it truly didn't do that much.

That would have been about 2007 or so, when I first encountered Innography. I remember being excited by its possibilities, but as a team, we couldn't shortlist it. It was a tool we all wanted to play with, but it was too early in its development: it just didn't do enough.

Later on, Jennifer said, Innography was a bit like a teenager. An inventive, innovative, brilliant teenager - but a teenager. Cocky. Rebellious. Preoccupied. Not particularly interested in listening. I remember Innography from that phase, too.

Innography Comes of Age

It's now 2014. The brilliant young person is older now. She's still innovative, still remarkable, but she's wiser, more self-assured. She's learned a lot.

And this, Jennifer believes, is where Innography is now. I would agree.

Figure 1: Sample Company Comparison visualisation from the spring 2014 release. By correlating patent information with other sources of business information such as litigation, trademark, standards, and company information, Innography’s Advanced Analysis platform enables users to view patent information in a business context.

It also allows users to compare patents and patent portfolios in terms of patent strength, using either Innography’s proprietary metrics or custom metrics devised by the client. Company Comparison allows users to compare up to five different companies. Visualisations can be modified online and then exported as presentation-ready graphics.

More Than Just Patent Information Retrieval

Innography has come of age.

It is my opinion that it now offers users more than just an innovative patent information retrieval platform.

Through its suite of information products, but more importantly, through the people it chooses to support its clients and develop its products, Innography provides its customers with a comprehensive approach to embedding and developing high quality intellectual property business intelligence expertise throughout an enterprise.

The company's commitment to client success seems to inform every aspect of the business: from the company's choice of sales and support personnel to the design of its user interfaces, from its investment in face-to-face user conferences to the deep embedding of user education and intellectual property expertise in its tools and help files.

As a company, it seems generous, collaborative, and thoroughly invested in the success of its clients. Not too shabby for a seven-year-old.

Editor's Note

Innography has a host of interesting features. The full FreePint Report: Product Review of Innography is now available in PDF format, in a convenient package for reference and sharing, for those with a FreePint Subscription.

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