Benchmarking National - PRO INNO Europe

62 % of high relevance, and for another 2 % of medium relevance). Against the
background that many service providers (including serv.ip and the PIC Stuttgart)
contemplated that the visibility of the service to SMEs and respective marketing
activities are areas in need of improvement, this result can be seen as a strong
indication that marketing needs should be especially addressed when setting up
patent database search services.
The second most important factor is seen in the competence of the staff, which
54 % consider to be of high relevance. This is in line with the findings that staff
qualification is a key issue when setting up IPR support services in general, due to
the complex cross-disciplinary nature of the subject. In the context of search
services it might be assumed that SMEs expect personnel to be fully familiar with
the search tools and the database records available; furthermore, it can be expected
that help with interpreting search results is aimed for, at least to a certain extent.
However, as the scope of the service offerings and referral activities are not among
the higher rated factors, it can also be assumed that the expertise of the staff is
expected to focus mostly on the very subject of patent information; a further
extension of the service offerings, i.e., to cover training, educational and consulting
needs beyond those possibilities already offered, is thus not anticipated.
This does not mean that the introduction of such value-added services should not
be undertaken; the relatively high share of users who believe that dissemination
information on “why and why not” to patent is important (for 32 % of high
relevance and for another 12 % of medium relevance) points to a need in this
direction. It may be suspected, however, that adding service offerings might also
Graph 24 Relevance of key quality factors for the design of patent database
search services similar to the ones investigated in the good practice
analysis, aggregated perceptions of user of patent search services
Ease of access & identification
Competence of Staff
Timely delivery
Scope of service
Spatial distance
Costs
Administrative efforts
Referal to & availability of other services in-house
Referal to external services
Individual contact
Information on different IP strategies (”why/why notto patent”)
Technical information (”how to patent”) 26
6
12
20
18
15
25
21
32
27
45
24
15
54
62
21
24
22
19
36
12
9
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
high relevance medium relevance
Source: User survey, services considered: serv.ip search services, IOI and PIC Stuttgart, n = 95
2
7
%
91
TOWARDS GOOD PRACTICES – THE REAL WORLD OF IPR SUPPORT SERVICES