Competitive intelligence is a critical factor in the decision-making process for businesses. When assessing competitive intelligence insights, competitors’ sales, strategies, and market share are what come to mind.
However, some of the least talked about, but most often used insights by industry-leading companies across the world are from patent landscaping analysis.
In this blog, we will discuss the most important competitive intelligence insights you can derive through patent filing analysis.
Five Important Insights from Patent Landscaping analysis.
1. Knowing When Your Competitor is Developing a new product
Patents are the first conclusive indicator that your competitor is developing something innovative. By monitoring your competition‘s filings regularly, you can stay on top of what they are working on. This allows you to decide if this is an area of business you want to stay in or be competitive in.
If the innovations they are developing are within proximity to your core IP, you can also stay on top of it to mitigate the risk of infringement.
2. Assess Your Competitor's use of human capital
Are your competitors working with universities or other research institutions?
Patent landscaping helps you unravel your competitor’s strategic partnerships through their filing registries. This helps you compare their partnerships to yours to see if they’re competitive enough, helping you decide if you should seek new or additional alliances.
3. Assess a competitor's Research & Development Efforts and Strategic Direction
Using patent mapping, you’ll be able to see “clusters” of patents surrounding a particular technology or line of business. Seeing the frequency and proximity of the patents around a specific area gives insight into competitors’ efforts and focus in that arena.
This gives you specific insights into whether your competitors are abandoning (or developing) an area of business. That insight is pivotal to helping you identify if their actions encroach on your technology or if there is a new line of business your company may wish to explore.
4. Insight into Their Level of Funding for New R&D
Knowing how patents are filed can give great insight into the level of funding your competitor has given to the new technology. If the innovation was filed by a private inventor with little legal representation, you can infer that it is a low-value patent. Conversely, if it was a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) Filing, you can deduce that the innovation has significant value to your competitor.
5. Frequency of Litigation
Reviewing the legal history of a patent indicates the level of effort your competitor has given to it. Rigorous prosecution indicates that the company has placed a lot of priority on this technology and is willing to go to great lengths to protect it. This information is a necessary component to inferring how important the technology is to their lines of business.
If there is a lot of litigation surrounding the innovation, you can infer it has a great deal of importance to the company. Conversely, a lack of legal activity can indicate that the patent has been abandoned, or they no longer prioritize its usefulness.
While there is so much information that can be unearthed on your competitors through IP analysis, it would be impossible to cover it all in a single blog entry. These five areas are some of the most universally used IP insights for competitive intelligence.
By continuously monitoring your patent landscape insights, you’ll know your market’s playing field like the back of your hand. By effectively using this data, you’ll be able to more accurately discern your competition’s next moves to either beat them to it or cautiously watch them proceed.
Insightloupe is an industry-leading platform that houses all your past, present, and future IP projects into one safe and easily managed repository. It also routinely gathers information from your top competitors, as well as your current portfolio, and generates intuitive visualizations and reports you can use to make strategic business decisions in real-time.
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