Data is the new oil.” Big data experts love to use that phrase these days, but who said it first? According to Google, Clive Humby, a British mathematician, did. In 2006, he said: “Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined, it cannot really be used.”
The Getty family made their money with oil, but Mark Getty thinks he’s discovered a better substitute. The co- founder of Getty Images, one of the world’s largest photo agencies, believes IP is the new oil. IP? That’s “intellectual property” and it includes the inventions, innovations, books, paintings, designs and images used in commerce.
“Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century,” said Mark Getty in 2000, but while IP is valuable, just like data is, IP cannot really be used to make money without copyright, trademarks and patents.
To see how valuable and well protected patents are, I took a trip to the offices of the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich beside the River Isar. Visitors entering the building are first directed to the right-hand side, where they must produce a photo ID and fill out a form. After an official has entered the required information into the system, a badge is printed. Then one joins the line on the left-hand side, where an airport-like security screening involving metal detectors takes place and, if everything is OK, the badged visitor can then proceed. If you don’t want to go through all this, but you’d still like to learn more about patents, the EPO’s Espacenet database is available online for both beginners and experts, and is updated daily. It contains more than 100 million patent documents from around the world and Espacenet makes it relatively easy to find out whether or not a patent has been granted and whether it is still in force.
Then there’s PATSTAT, which helps people perform detailed online statistical analyses of patent data. This EPO service has become the standard in the field of patent intelligence and statistics.
Why are these resources so important? Because the patents that companies get today can tell us a lot about what’s going to happen tomorrow. Apple, for example, has filed 54 patents to turn its iPhone into a medical device that can monitor biometric data such as blood pressure and body fat levels. Apple also hopes to develop algorithms to predict abnormal heart rates with the help of the iPhone. If you are thinking of starting a digital healthcare business, knowing which innovations the tech giants are working on could help you pick the medtech areas that are going to be hot in the coming years and, very importantly, identify potential partners.
Piero Scaruffi, the Italian-American author of A History of Silicon Valley, summed up the data–oil–IP debate best when he wrote: “The difference between oil and data is that oil does not generate more oil (unfortunately).”
Despite the latest fracking innovations and OPEC’s promises to pump ever more oil, the fact remains that oil is a limited resource. But data isn’t, and neither is IP. What the EPO shows us is that we will never run out of ideas or data.