The Company’s own patent was studied as shown in the figure. Although it can be seen that it heavily built on the work of others, most notably National Starch, it has not received any forward citations itself. In part this could be because it is so new. It is also possible that the art contains narrow claims. Considering this and the other two top cited-by patents, the analysis team considers that root-tree searching might uncover other meaningful art. This would help better determine if there’s freedom for the new business development team to work in this area. There’s definitely the possibility of potential infringement which would require a detailed claims analysis.