Patents and scientific papers are the earliest hard evidence of technological change. ITONICS, the leading provider of the operating system for R&D, innovation and portfolio management, has now brought all of it into its context-aware AI, Prism: 172.2 million patent records and 325.9 million scholarly works from Lens, searchable without leaving the ITONICS system.
For technology scouts, R&D leaders, and foresight teams, this closes one of the most persistent gaps in market and technology intelligence: the distance between asking a question about the state of the art and having the evidence to answer it.
Half a billion documents, one prompt
That evidence is also the most tedious to work with. Classification schemes, office-specific syntax, paywalled abstracts, and query languages built for information professionals mean that in practice, most teams check the literature once (usually at the start of a project) and then rely on secondary sources.
With Lens.org integrated into Prism, the state of the art becomes a conversation. A scout can ask "Show recent patents related to autonomous cars, granted in the last two years, owned by companies in Japan" and receive a cited answer in seconds. These results can then be turned directly into elements, radars, or ratings inside the workspace.
The depth is notable: the oldest patent record in the index dates back to 1790, the oldest scientific article to 1800. Combined with the ITONICS signals pool and web-source retrieval, Prism now reasons across roughly half a billion structured documents plus the open web.
What the integration covers
Prism retrieves from three layers. Lens supplies the structured patent and research evidence; web-source retrieval picks up what never makes it into a database in the first place.
| Source | Coverage | Content type |
|---|---|---|
| Lens.org – Patents | ~172.2M records from 100+ patent offices, incl. USPTO, EPO, WIPO/PCT, DPMA, JPO, CNIPA, KIPO, UK IPO, INPI, CIPO, IP Australia | Patents |
| Lens.org – Research | ~325.9M scholarly works, aggregated from CrossRef, PubMed, PubMed Central, OpenAlex, and CORE | Scientific publications |
| Web sources | Complements the structured sources with additional document types | News, funding announcements, M&A, government publications, market reports |
Exhibit 1: The sources inside ITONICS Prism
Together, these cover the full evidence chain of an emerging technology: the paper, the patent, and the market move.
Read against your own portfolio data in ITONICS, that evidence chain answers harder questions than "what's happening in this field?". Which of our current bets just got riskier? Where is there white space worth funding? Who else is working on this, and should we build, buy, or partner? The evidence and the portfolio finally sit in the same place.
Ask in plain language, filter like an analyst
Prism translates natural language into precise queries. Every filter an information professional would reach for is available in the prompt and can be used to include or exclude values:
- For patents: patent type and status, applicant, inventor, owner, owner country, CPC and IPCR classification, language.
- For research: publication type, author, author institution and country, source journal or conference, publisher, and external IDs such as DOI, PMID, or OpenAlex.
- For time: Prism searches the last six months by default. Widen, narrow, or shift the window in your prompt to "in the last two years", or "published in 2025, excluding April".
Example prompts:
- "Find papers about score-based models published this year, but exclude April."
- "Find papers about electric-car batteries where the publication type is journal article and the source country is the United States."
- "Find patents about spirometry."
Evidence you can cite
When a prompt requires patent or research evidence, Prism queries Lens and cites the results in its response. This means that every claim in a Radar, Element Description or Portfolio Review can be traced back to a source document.
As with every part of Prism, the data governance model is unchanged: retrieval and synthesis happen inside the ITONICS ecosystem, and customer data is never used to train or fine-tune AI models.
By the time a technology makes the news, the patent has been public for years. Lens.org and Prism put those years back in your hands.
Dr. Christian Mühlroth, CEO, ITONICS
Availability
The Lens.org integration is available now for all Prism users in ITONICS. No configuration is required.
Full documentation, including coverage details, the complete filter reference, and a short demo video showing how to query Lens.org with Prism, is available in the ITONICS Knowledge Base: Patents & Research with Lens.org
About ITONICS
ITONICS is a global leader in innovation and portfolio management software, empowering organizations to identify emerging trends and technologies, manage innovation portfolios, and execute strategies with measurable impact. ITONICS unites insights, foresight, and execution in one collaborative platform. Recognized by Gartner in four innovation categories in the Hype Cycle for Innovation Practices, ITONICS supports over 500 companies worldwide, including Amazon, adidas, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, Mondelez, and Siemens.
