Summary
A Tech Assessment draws on three kinds of data: public web research, the text and documents you supply, and additional sources available on Premium assessments. Public web research runs on every assessment. Anything only you or the inventor knows reaches the assessment when you put it there.
When an assessment misses something you expected it to find, the usual reason is that nobody published it and nobody supplied it.
When to use
An assessment did not mention something you know about the technology and you want to know why.
You are writing the input for an assessment and want to know what to include.
A colleague asks whether the assessment read the files they uploaded.
You are about to change a setting to fix a vague result.
How it works
Public web research
Every evaluation researches the public record, on every assessment. If the technology, its market, or its competitors appear somewhere published and findable, the assessment can research them: journal articles, patent documents, company websites, news coverage, regulatory notices.
Public research can only find what someone has published. It cannot reach an unpublished test result, a conversation with a prospective licensee, or a filing decision still under discussion.
What you supply
Anything only you or the inventor knows reaches the assessment one of two ways. You enter it in Technology Context, or you upload it under Upload Document. There is no third route. The assessment cannot ask the inventor a question.
Facts worth supplying, because they change scores and are rarely public:
unpublished performance or test data
disclosure history, including any conference talk, poster, thesis, or grant abstract that has already gone public
funding status, and what the funding covers
internal validation results, and what you measured
the filing position: what you have filed, where, and when
Important: Having your uploaded documents read is not a Premium feature. Every assessment reads the text you enter and the documents you upload, on every tier.
Each evaluation reads your documents for the details it needs, so one upload serves the whole assessment. Upload the source document rather than a summary of it. The assessment reads the full text and picks up detail a summary drops.
Premium sources
Premium assessments add three sources on top of public web research:
company data, where an evaluation needs to name real companies as potential partners or competitors
market reports, where an evaluation needs a market size or revenue figure
patent similarity search, which finds published patent documents conceptually close to the technology you described
The assessment Overview panel, showing the Overall Score beside a summary and a column of assessment-level counts: Input Quality, Searches, Sources and Evaluators.
Basic assessments skip all three. They still run public web research and read everything you supplied, so every evaluation produces a score and the reasoning behind it. For what the patent similarity search does and how far you can trust it, see Premium patent data: what it is and how to use it. For everything else that changes between tiers, see Basic and Premium: what changes.
Why a thin disclosure produces a vague assessment
An assessment can reason only about what reached it. A two-paragraph disclosure with no uploaded documents leaves every evaluation working from the public record alone. The writing comes back general about the field rather than specific about your technology.
No setting corrects that. A deeper research depth searches the public record harder, but it cannot learn what the inventor never wrote down. A different assessment template changes which evaluations run, and it adds no evidence. To change the result, give the assessment more to work with. The pre-flight check reports where your input is thin. See Pre-flight checks: preview before you spend a run.
Tips
Write down what is not published. Two sentences about unpublished test data usually move a score more than any setting you can change.
State what has already gone public, and when. Disclosure history changes the patent picture, and public research is least able to reconstruct it.
Upload the full disclosure form instead of the abstract alone.
Put a fact in the input even when you believe it is published somewhere. Public research only covers material someone published, which is narrower than everything that is true about the technology.
Name the competitors you know about. A company with no web presence is invisible to public research.
Common issues
The assessment missed something I know about the technology. Check whether anyone published that fact, and whether you entered it in Technology Context or uploaded a document containing it. If nobody did either, no research depth reaches it.
The assessment did not appear to use my uploaded file. Tier is not the cause, because every assessment reads uploaded documents. Confirm the upload finished before you generated the assessment, and that the file did not come back with a rejection reason. A file with no extractable text, such as a scan saved as an image, gives the assessment nothing to read.
Market or competitor detail is thinner than I expected. Company data and market reports are Premium sources. On a Basic assessment, those evaluations work from public web research and your own input. See Basic and Premium: what changes.
No comparable patents came back. Patent similarity search runs on Premium assessments only. See Premium patent data: what it is and how to use it.
Two assessments of the same technology cited different sources. Public research runs against live sources, so the set of pages it finds moves between runs.
Frequently asked questions
Does a Basic assessment read my uploaded documents?
Yes. Reading the text and documents you supply works on every tier. It is not a Premium feature.
Does research depth change which data reaches the assessment?
No. Research depth changes how much public research the assessment does. It does not change which of the three kinds of data reach it, and it cannot make a Premium source available on a Basic assessment.
Why did the assessment cite a competitor I have never heard of and miss the one I know?
Public research finds published material. A company that documents itself online appears in the research. A competitor you know about from a conference conversation does not, unless you write it into the input.
Can the assessment pull the technology record out of our own system?
No. The assessment reads the technology context and the documents you supply. It does not reach into other systems on its own. The exception is when you start an assessment from something else, such as creating one from a project or from Inteum. That starting point supplies the context.
If I upload a document after the assessment finishes, does it get read?
No. Each assessment records the input you submitted, and that input is fixed once the assessment runs. Run a new assessment with the fuller input.
Who else can see the material I supply?
Your assessment is private to your account until you choose to share it. Copy public link on a finished assessment produces a link, and anyone who opens that link can read the whole assessment, including the technology context you entered and the content of the documents you uploaded.
Warning: Anyone who has the link can read the assessment, even if you did not send it to them. Share it only where you would be willing to share the disclosure itself.