Historians have a tendency to track eras. Whether it's the dead ball/lively ball eras of baseball or the golden and silver ages of comic books, specialists in a field love to codify time periods long past. It helps us examine what the future may hold. And, at the ninth annual “Best Practices in Patent Monetization” seminar, Jim Malackowski of Ocean Tomo did indeed mark the past trends in the IP marketplace even as he mapped out the future.

Malackowski outlined eras such as the period of “Feudal Lords,” the “Rise of the Intermediaries” and the “Age of the Golden Rule,” as he tracked the progress of the IP marketplace from the 1970s to the 21^st century. Then, he set out to explain how Ocean Tomo seeks to bring rationality to the marketplace, and how it has developed tools to do just that.

The Ocean Tomo 300 consists of 300 companies selected on the quality of their patents. That index of 300 companies has outperformed the stock market for 15 years, Malackowski claims, and that is due to the data-driven analysis that is Ocean Tomo's hallmark. In seeking to create the equivalent of a “credit score for IP,” the company analyzes data to predict which patents are the strongest and uses the resulting scores to make investment decisions.