Ocado on balancing IP protection with mitigation of patent risk and conflict

Head of IP, Lucy Wojcik, talks about the need for instant answers to who’s doing what and how Cipher helps Ocado implement a world class IP strategy to garner IP protection. Digital transformation is not simply about making your products available going on-line. Ocado is the world’s largest pure-play on-line grocery retailer and it’s never owned a shop and probably never will. Its stock is the technology to enable ordering, fulfilment and delivery. It employs over 13,000 people, and many of those are engineers. Compare that to Walmart’s 2.1 million. At the heart of Ocado’s automated fulfilment are a patented array of robots and grids that pick and pack groceries in a warehouse that resembles a space station more than a supermarket.

This approach means that in technology terms, it is up against IBM, GE, Honeywell and ABB just as much as it is competing with supermarket chains who are offering their own e-commerce solutions. That poses a very specific challenge as companies in this cohort have been patenting for decades and there are now well over a million patents in the area of on-line shopping, fulfilment and delivery. If you include Ocado’s trial with autonomous vehicles add another million.

It seems entirely fitting that Ocado have turned to AI to find a solution and are working with Cipher, the world’s leading platform for Strategic Patent Intelligence. So how do you dodge a million bullets? Part of the answer lies in the way Ocado reframed the question.

To better understand the challenge requires a quick detour into patent wars across the ages. This includes Wright and Curtiss (powered flight), Edison and Westinghouse (light bulbs), Polaroid and Kodak (instant photography) and Nokia, Apple, Samsung and just about everyone in the smartphone wars. The basic premise is that patents confer the right to exclude others from using your invention. Extrapolating from that position creates the myth that patents confer a quasi-monopoly.

While there may be some truth in a world where there are not many patents, a fresh approach is required when there are now 100 million patents owned by 1 million companies registered in over 100 countries. This approach involves training algorithms to identify and sort those patents that may be relevant to a given technology or innovation.

So in a hypothetical example where you need to understand the sensors used by European OEMs in autonomous vehicles, AI now enables you to produce market maps. This type of report is available to Ocado instantly which enables it to quickly figure out who’s doing what and the areas of Ocado’s technology horizon likely to be impacted by such competition. Lucy states that the alternative is to fly blind and to hope that nothing goes wrong. That’s about as crazy as allowing 1000s of our bots to move freely on our grid and hope that they don’t hit each other.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the expertise necessary to analyse patents is a task that can only be performed by humans. Not only is that no longer true, but it is no longer practical. Reading a patent can take well over an hour so even a cursory review of 1,000 patents would take months.

Cipher CEO Nigel Swycher, himself a former IP lawyer, suggests that this is not purely a matter of human vs machine. He states that Cipher’s role is to make patent information more accessible. The protection and exploitation of patented technologies is now a key commercial consideration and that means presenting data in a form that can facilitates communication between heads of IP and the technology and corporate strategy teams they support.

AI is ubiquitous so it is perhaps no surprise that algorithms have a vital role to play in the innovation lifecycle that begins with the design of robots and end up with groceries on your doorstep.