Korea Patent Attorneys Association (KPAA President: Hong Jang-won) patent rating evaluation system ‘EXsys Value’ has officially launched on the 7th of this month.

‘EXsys Value’ is a patent rating evaluation system developed by patent attorneys who worked in the field at least 10 years and provides objective results of qualitative evaluations.

It encompasses the rights individual patents and protective strengths that were not properly captured in the existing quantitative evaluation system.

‘EXsys Value’ has adopted the ‘Delphi method’ to secure reliability.

‘Delphi method’ was first developed in 1950s by Research and Development Corporation (RAND) and is currently widely used as a proven method to objectify qualitative evaluations by experts.

The evaluation results through EXsys Value’ are shown in PA grades. PA grades are classified into grades of 1 to 10 PA 1 to be the best.

In March this year in a pilot operation of ‘EXsys Value’ 446 attorneys participated and evaluated 384 patents of 19 public research institutions in Korea. According to the evaluation results reliability of the system were confirmed by showing very consistent results even though evaluators have done blind evaluations without knowing each others evaluation scores.

The average PA grade of 384 patents was 4.63 and the Korea Institute of Biotechnology and other six institutions out of 19 received above average.

Hong Jang-won President of KPPA said that unlike academic papers patents are intended to be used in industries. In other words patents will be evaluated as patents themselves not the characteristics of the applicants whether they are companies or research institutes. To be commercialized the patent itself needs to be competitive. Unlike the conventional patent evaluation system which was not possible for patent attorneys to participate ‘EXsys Value’ will contribute greatly in terms of intellectual property (IP) utilization in the future because it is highly utilizable in fields such as IP finance and basic data for commercialization.

KPAA plans to issue certificate tag for evaluation results using the system and operate an intellectual property evaluation specialist attorney system to create an environment where evaluation results can be trusted and utilized in the market.