Competitive Intelligence

“It’s good to know what your competitors are doing. It’s better to know what they’re planning.”

Competitive Intelligence involves understanding your competition and anticipating their future development efforts to predict the commercialization of their products or services. This is done by utilizing external data collected from different sources such as web content, credible outlets, industry experts, competitors and more.

Use Publicly Available Patent Data

Publicly available patent data is of vital importance to competitive intelligence and a great source for ideas and information that can be used to identify opportunities in the market. This information can be made to accumulate data on competitors and the market to drive decision making. The collection of this data is known as a patent landscape.

Patent Landscape

A good source for Competitive Intelligence and good patent management is done through the creation of a patent landscape. A patent landscape is an analysis of patent data that reveals trends within your industry. Identifying trends, which patents and competitors are in your industry, areas that are heavily or lightly patented are some of the things addressed by the creation and analysis of a patent landscape.

Questions to Ask Before You Begin

Prior to your analysis and gathering of Competitive Intelligence, you should have a few questions in mind.

Is your idea a growing area of interest?
Current interests in the field?
Who are the key players and are they fling their inventions?
Who are the key opinion leaders in this field?

Optimize Your Search Strategy

To improve your patent search you must identify addition keywords, active assignees, classification codes, and inventors that are relevant to your field and potential patent. If you’re using a patent database, utilize all the features such as semantic search, analytics, thesauri, and text mining to make your search more comprehensive.

Know Where Your Industry is Going Next

Using our proprietary procedure, we analyze your competitors’ current patents, commercialization activities and their recent patent filings. By combining these three elements we can accurately predict their next moves. You’ll see far in advance which devices and technologies they plan to unveil in the coming years. You will know where their pitfalls are and who can become your partner. All of this will help take your Competitive Intelligence and patent management to a new level.