When deciding whether to file a patent on a company's innovations, it is important to analyze the allowance rates and other prosecution statistics of similar technologies. This data won't tell you if your innovation is inventive or novel; it will give you a clear understanding of how other Applicants have faired when filing patent applications on similar technologies.
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office characterizes technologies into four-digit numerical codes, referred to as art units, which are grouped into technology groups. Computerized vehicle control systems are grouped into Group 3660.
Group 3660 is very favorable to obtaining patent protection with an overall allowance rate of 81.5% of patent applications per LexisNexis statistics. Patents in this technology area have an 87.3% allowance rate when at least one examiner interview is conducted during prosecution. Applicantions in these art units also received only 1.6 average office actions per grant/abandonment. Further, in our experience it is far less common to appeal in these highly innovative technology areas; however, Applicants who did appeal also found strong success rates. While only 4.9% of applications in the analyzed dataset went to appeal, 63.6% of those appeals ended with an outcome categorized as an Applicant Win by Lexis.
One key takeaway is that the patent office is not a black-box system with uncertain and unpredictable results. Companies can get helpful likelihood statistics of the patent process by predicting which art unit their technologies will fall into and reviewing the examination statistics of that art unit as part of the decision process of whether to file for patent protection. In the case of robotics control systems, the data shows clear favorability in investing in patent protection.
