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New Quiz
A Patent Search Challenge: the most advanced search quiz
ever published
This quiz is the most difficult ever proposed in the IPR-Helpdesk
Bulletin. It is aimed at passionate patent searchers and information freaks.
The following picture is a book excerpt that recently landed in the
hands of the quiz author.
Based on this text only, retrieve the patent antedated by the French
patent. Genuine search aficionados can try finding the French patent.
A small hint: the search for the first patent should not take more
than 2 minutes if you use the right strategy.
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Solution to previous quiz
The expanding shoe
For happy parents, shoes are usually very disposable items that do
not last very long as the feet of their children grow very quickly. Some
companies have developed shoes that last longer because they can adjust to the
size of your children’s feet. This is an innovation that creates
products with more longevity and also benefits the environment.
Try finding patents covering this type of product using
esp@cenet®
Copyright Inchworm Shoes
Solution
Step one: To find similar patents, identify
the most pertinent aspects of the invention -- common technical features that
may be found in related patents -- and for each aspect, define a comprehensive
set of synonyms. To perform the search, this set of synonyms can be combined as
keywords in the patent database.
In this case, the following concepts -- groups of synonyms covering
the different aspects of the invention -- can be defined:
- Shoe, footwear
- expand*, variable, adjust*
- size, length
-
The combination: shoe expand* size yields some interesting
documents:
US2006130371,
Expansion system to increase the size of a shoe,
WO2005039343,
Method of making an expandable shoe
US2005050772,
Expandable shoe and shoe assemblies
These documents show that our basic invention is not new. The latter
two patents are held by the company producing the shoe depicted in the picture.
More documents can be found moving to the second step using the patent
classification.
Step 2: Use the classification assigned to
relevant documents to refine and complete the search.
The classification symbol assigned to the above documents
corresponds to our invention:
A43B3/26
Footwear
adjustable by length or size
Using this symbol, you can retrieve all 714
patent
documents classified under this symbol
Browsing through the results you can find a couple of additional
documents like:
EP1811873,
Fitting system for children's footwear
CN1951245,
Expandable shoe and shoe assemblies
All of these patent documents relate to the shoes depicted or
similar ones. Before developing or marketing such shoes, it is wise to check
all those patents to see if they are still in force. This extensive type of
search must be left to a professional.
This initial search showed very quickly that such products are
heavily patented and that real innovations in this field relate to improvements
on the basic idea, which is quite old, as can be seen on the below
figure
from a French patent FR578840 dated 1924.
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