Freedom-to-
Operate Analysis

A Freedom-to-Operate analysis, abbreviated FTO-analysis, is an extensive analysis of existing rights which is conducted for the purpose of ascertaining the risk of infringing patent rights when bringing a company’s product, process, or service to market.

The analysis involves an extensive search for patent rights and an evaluation of their relevance for the product, process or service intended to be put on market.

An FTO-analysis may represent an important tool in areas of technology under fierce competition where the risk of infringing others patent rights may be significant and where ascertaining risks of infringement may be of high strategic significance to a company.

In theory all relevant patent rights may be analyzed, however in practice this may not be possible, and the FTO-analysis is typically limited in one or more ways, for example geographically limited to relevant markets for the company or limited in terms of the scope of the search for patent rights.

In other words, a more comprehensive FTO-analysis may provide a better risk assessment, however most companies will in practice be limited by IP-budgets which may necessitate some kind of limitations on the FTO-analysis.

In Patentgruppen we usually take a pragmatic approach on FTO-analysis such that we, together with the client, can define a scope of the FTO-analysis which may provide a relevant risk assessment within a specific budget.