Client: An India based glass-manufacturing company

Scope of Assignment: Perform a clearance search for Glass manufactured by a particular process for US & India Jurisdiction

Epiphany Solution: The process of manufacture of the glass was studied in minute detail in conjunction with the R&D Engineers at the client location. Important process steps that can be retraced from the end product were identified. A patent search restricted by Jurisdiction was conducted for India and US Jurisdiction, respectively and relevant patents for each of these important steps were identified.

Identifying relevant patents for the Indian Jurisdiction comprehensively is a sizable challenge as the digitization of the records at the Indian Patent Office is still a work in progress. Records only after 2005 are available for search on the Indian Patent Office website and further the search is limited to certain sections. For example, no full text search is possible.

In addition to performing a search on third-party database for results prior to 2005, team members visited the Delhi Patent Office library and manually checked records of publications for identifying relevant results. Further, a check was performed on Ekaswa CD records maintained by the Indian Patent Office to ensure that no record was left unchecked.

On identifying the patents relevant to the study, claims of the identified patents were mapped to the process steps for identifying the extent of overlap and the analysis provided to the client.

The analysis provided by Epiphany enabled the client to identify potential IP bottlenecks and accordingly design necessary work-around techniques for manufacturing glass by tweaking aspects of the particular process.