Grab’s patent-friendly environment is a catalyst for innovation

Many components of the Grab app are powered by unique technology developed in-house. These innovations contribute to our growing patent portfolio. Today, Grab holds the largest patent portfolio in Southeast Asia among its peers.

Southeast Asia underwent substantial economic growth, digitalisation, and technological development in recent years. However, no Southeast Asian nation featured in the top-10 of patent-filing countries in 2022, despite their sizable populations. Meanwhile, small countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands made the list. India ranks 7th. China alone contributed almost half of all global patent applications that year.

Patents can incentivise innovation and help businesses grow and expand. We’ve seen this play out first-hand at Grab. 

Our patents cover important front- and back-end features tailor-made to improve the user experience of our on-demand app. These features boost driver productivity and help micro, small and medium sized enterprises grow their businesses online.

(Read more: The key to Grab driver-partners earning more: Productivity)

We established the Grab Patent Office (GPO) in 2019 to steer and coordinate our patent strategies. We cultivate a patent-friendly environment to drive innovation within the organisation—and hope to inspire other technology enterprises to do so as well. 

Patents developed at Grab 

Beyond playing an important role in the innovation landscape, patents play a crucial role in motivating teams. Grab rewards contributions to our patent portfolio, including financially. We have a leaderboard that highlights inventors who have accumulated the highest number of patents. These measures recognise our inventors for the dedication of time and resources put into research and development. 

Lead data scientist Sun Chang, for instance, filed a patent for the allocation probability model for “just-in-time allocation” in 2023.

Getting our delivery-partners to arrive at restaurants at the right time requires our machine learning and predictive analytics engines to figure out when we should assign a delivery-partner to head towards the restaurant. Our engineers refer to this sweet spot as the “just-in-time” window.

The Grab system calculates this based on multiple factors such as the time taken for food preparation, an estimate of how long it would take to assign an order to a delivery-partner as well as the time taken for delivery-partners to get to the restaurant and pick up the order. 

Figuring out this process for Southeast Asian kitchens and making it scalable is far from trivial, and it has helped Grab, its merchant and driver-partners fulfil orders more efficiently.

For technology or process to be patentable, it must contain something novel, non-obvious, and must be industrially applicable. To identify potentially patentable innovations the GPO holds ideation sessions with Grab’s tech teams. We also keep an eye out for patentable inventions from events like the company’s hackathon (known as Grabathon).

Most recently, Last Mile Navigation—developed by a team at the tenth edition of Grabathon—was put on its patent application journey. 

In Southeast Asian cities, delivery-partners often face the challenge of locating the exact drop-off points, because clear address information is not always available. Delivery-partners therefore have to rely on additional information from consumers via GrabChat or notes.

By mining data from consumer notes and chats using a natural language processing model, we’re now able to provide more precise delivery instructions to drivers when they’re about to reach the drop-off point.