What are your competitors planning? How can you find out? You might read the Wall Street Journal, trade magazines, and blogs; you might attend conferences and meetings; you might ask your colleagues. But if you need timely information about new technologies and competitive threats, you should take advantage of patent analysis.
When companies need to protect a valuable technology they apply for a patent. The patent application, by law, contains a detailed description of how to make and use the invention. In addition, the application contains information about the company, inventors, collaborators, related patents, and legal representatives. Acquiring this information is the purpose of a state-of-the-art search, also known as a patent landscape search. Analyzing the information provides competitive intelligence you can use to smash your competitors as explained in this article – how to patent an idea with InventHelp.
Patent analysis delivers competitive intelligence insights in three areas: identifying players, identifying technologies, and estimating technology value.
Identifying Players
- Business competitors – Monitoring the patenting activity of your direct competitors can show you where they intend to move next.
- Intellectual property competitors – Companies that patent, but don’t practice, in your area might be willing to license their technology, or they may use litigation to extract royalties from you.
- Emerging competitors – Patent analysis will help you identify new competitors before they become a threat.
- Collaborators – Examining patent assignees will help you find out who’s working with who. Which companies have research agreements with other companies, universities, and institutes.
- Technology acquisition – Would you like to acquire companies or technology? Patent analysis shows you who to look at more closely.
- Key inventors – Which inventors are driving the development of new technology? A look at their patents provides the answer.
- Size of effort – Patent analysis will show you how much effort your competitors are spending on R&D. How many inventors. How many research locations. How many patents. How many technologies.
Identifying Technologies
- Technology development – What are the latest developments in your technology? Patent analysis delivers the answer.
- Technology drivers – If you need to know which companies, and which inventors, are driving technology improvements, patent analysis delivers the answer.
- Estimating Technology Value – The more money a company is willing to invest in a patent, the more valuable they believe it is.
- Page count – Longer patents take longer to write and tend to be more valuable.
- Claim count – The larger the claim set the higher the application fees – the higher the value invested.
- Family size – The larger the patent family – provisional applications, divisional applications continuations, continuation-in-part applications, foreign applications – the more invested and the higher the value.
- Portfolio size – A large group of patents is more valuable than a small group.
- Citations – Patents that are highly cited by later patents are generally more valuable.
- Dates – Filing dates can show if the effort is growing or shrinking, and therefore the value.
- Legal status – Are the maintenance fees being paid? Valuable patents are kept in force.
- Legal representation – Who wrote and filed the patent? Strong patent firms are used for important patents.
For more information, or to request a quotation, or to get support from InventHelp please contact InventHelp.