Regional PATLIB centres as integrated one-stop service providers for intellectual property services

Exemplifying the case of PATON, a large patent information centre in Germany, this paper describes a wide range of services PATLIB centres can offer today. The expansion of its scope of products and services beyond classical patent information in order to become a regional patent centre is also described. The paper further argues that PATLIB centres can benefit from an increasing demand of patent statistics, a tendency PATON responded to with the development of its own in-house software tool, and deliver complex patent and literature analyses one-stop to create value for firms.