SIG-BIZ Events
Patents for Non-Lawyers: Gleaning Pseudo-Proprietary Information from Publicly Available Resources
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 (12:00 PM - 1:00 PM) (EDT)
Joins us for a highly-interactive workshop for non-lawyers to better understand how to glean strategic and competitive insights from publicly-available global patent literature.
Main Topic: Patent Basics: Simple search can reveal where organizations are investing, which technologies are gaining momentum, and where market, licensing, partnership, and white-space opportunities may be emerging. Designed for competitive intelligence and information professionals who are not patent specialists, this one-hour webinar explains how publicly available patent records can support competitive, strategic, and financial decision-making.
Participants will learn to recognize useful patent elements and signals related to assignees, inventors, filing activity, citations, technology classifications, competitor focus, and organizational momentum.
Special Topic 1: AI Governance and Competitive Intelligence
Special Topic 2: AI and Patent Searching and Analysis
Learning Objectives
- Recognize the patent jargon and the fields and data elements most useful for competitive intelligence.
- Identify signals of competitor activity, technology direction, organizational momentum, and investment priorities.
- Explain how AI can assist with semantic search, clustering, summarization, trend analysis, reporting, and presentation.
- Translate patent findings into concise insights for executives, researchers, strategists, and investment decisionmakers.
Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES): Fresh from the Census Bureau
Thursday, November 19, 2026 (1:00 PM - 2:00 PM) (EST)
The Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES) new annual survey combines the following seven existing annual business surveys into a streamlined single survey:
- Annual Capital Expenditures Survey (ACES)
- Annual Retail Trade Survey (ARTS)
- Annual Survey of Manufacturers (ASM)
- Annual Wholesale Trade Survey (AWTS)
- Manufacturers’ Unfilled Orders Survey (M3UFO)
- Report of Organization (COS)
- Service Annual Survey (SAS)
The AIES provides key measures of economic activity, including the only comprehensive national and subnational data on business capital expenditures, employment, expenses, inventories, payroll, and revenues on an annual basis. AIES will serve as a benchmark for Census Bureau indicator programs and update the Business Register. Instead of breaking each company’s operations into distinct components for specific surveys, the new Annual Integrated Economic Survey will reduce respondent burden. The U.S. Census Bureau will release data from the 2024 AIES data collection cycle in March 2025. After this session, you will know the origins of the previous surveys, the purpose of the new survey, the methodology of collection, the scope of topics covered, and access to the data.
This is why you should register: For information professionals, the AIES arrives at a moment when data literacy is more important than ever. Our users — businesses, students, researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers — are increasingly expected to find, evaluate, and cite quantitative data as part of their work. The AIES gives us a powerful, authoritative, freely accessible tool to support that work.