The Lens for Research Institutions

You want to have a big impact and a serious footprint in society. To do that, you need funding for the social problem you are researching and you need a great team of students and researchers to help out. To achieve your goals, you also need to prove to your potential or current funders and any potential team candidates that you can deliver the goods.
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In scholarship of course, but much more. You need to show that your scholarship matters and influences our economy and society by informing products and practices.In what research discipline or technology sector lay your strengths? And, which areas can you build up?
Browse Lens In4M to find out, but also use it as a Rolodex to find those companies that read your work, know your researchers, and might be partners moving forward in R&D. Let In4M help your research team members identify which industries and which actors are influenced by their work, to better choose their educational trajectories. They may want to discover if their work is cited/used in patents by companies they respect and that may be a great incentive for them to stay and work in your institution.
The Lens for Prospective Students

Want to find a University, a Department, an Advisor, or a Mentor that is influential in a field in which you want to work? Never before has it been possible to hone your interests in innovation to particular specialties, but now, you can use the powerful Patent Classification text search in the Lens and discover what papers, what researchers and what Universities or institutions are creating work that is influential in your field of interest.
Perhaps an ideal training ground to build the linkages necessary for your future?
The Lens for Patent Offices

The
21st Century Patent Office needs to be much more than a mill for grinding out rights that fall to the courts to validate. Instead, it can be, and should be an enabler of innovation, of building bridges between ideas and outcomes, of stimulating investments and the resilience of the problem solving ecosystem.
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How?Certainly better patents will help, but fewer patents, only those that really deserve to be granted because they are new, non-obvious, useful and fully disclosed, are the best. And only those wherein the grant of a limited monopoly is needed to advance social progress.
Lens can help your examiners with a fresh, open user experience that integrates global patent publications with scholarly works, allows collections, annotation, and sharing.
As importantly, Lens is fully free, open and unlike the big players in Tech, completely respects your citizens’ privacy. It can be adapted for your citizens needs, language and culture; they are after all the intended beneficiaries of the patent system.
Let them discover the scope of what’s possible and how to lower the risk of their investment, research or business ambitions. Let informed citizens help support an effective and equitable society.
Who if not the patent office?
The Lens for Publishers

Are your journals, books or proceedings influential? Who is reading them in business, and why? Sure you may know that authors and researchers cite your publications. But is this true for the community of innovative businesses that turn scholarship into products and practices? Who *should* be reading your publications but isn’t? Are there neglected areas where new publishing imprints or modes can impact?
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Use Lens to explore the citations in the patent literature, and the domains of innovation that your publications make possible. Understand your competitor’s positions.
The Lens for Policy Makers

Policy has a limited set of levers to stimulate the economy and encourage beneficial social outcomes. To wield them wisely requires evidence-based insight into the networks of actors and influence. When these networks are clear, the points of weakness and strength emerge. The public increasingly wants value for its tax dollars.
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Answers to questions such as ‘is research funding effective in a particular field? For a particular purpose? Are some institutions better at building linkages to delivery? Are there policy tools that can improve a measurable deficiency?’ can be explored in the Lens.
The Lens for Researchers

Scholarly publications in science and technology are only a piece of a puzzle. There are millions of research outcomes in the patent literature that could inform your work, compete with your work, improve it or block it from seeing the light of day. Shouldn’t you know what’s out there?
There is an increasing amount of STEM and biomedical research done by the private sector that never appears in the conventional scholarly literature. But it is right there in the patent literature.
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Now, the Lens offers joined scholarly literature with cited works in the global patent literature and so it is easy to find those patents that cite familiar papers.Somewhere, there are researchers who have enough funding and don’t need more. For those two people, read no further. But for everyone else, have you even thought about what companies read your work, learn from it, use it to inform their product development pipelines?
Use Lens PatCite to discover just what patents, by which entities are citing your published work, or that of a colleague or a competitor. You know that way more than half of your know-how never makes it into a publication. That is valuable knowledge! And your future work is even more so. Why not contact the companies that read your work, and invite them to read your mind?
Carefully structured with your mission in mind, funding partnerships with the private sector are an important and growing component of research expenditure. They can be a welcome complement to hard-won and under-resourced competetive government or philanthropic research grants.
The Lens for Funders

There is an expectation that funds invested in public research should be justified, and in many cases, should influence or impact society. Funders -public and philanthropic -are expected to be mission compliant. Is this happening? Of course we have tools to measure whether the funded work is read by other credible scholars, but that’s a far cry from impact in the real world. Are the best investments being made?
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Are outcomes being blocked from becoming widely available because third party patent rights or a poor understanding of business incentives and blockers, or the wrong choice of partners at the wrong time?Can funders identify institutions that have particularly good practices in place to build partnership bridges to take research outcomes through to society?
Can funders identify research that is really necessary and is not a duplication of other efforts? Can funders find ‘white space’ that urgently needs investment to open new avenues of innovation?
Can funders expose or incentivize linkages between private and public actors, while maintaining public-good focus and mission?
The Lens provides a resource to explore such questions.