Intellectual property (IP) is the core asset of many companies, especially those in technology-based industries. Discovering the true value of IP – both as a company asset and as a competitive weapon – is crucial for overall business success. Gaining insights into IP value can lead to new revenue sources such as licensing opportunities, new product development, and strategic partnerships. It can also aid the development of a competitive business strategy by helping to determine a patent’s -- or an entire portfolio’s -- effect on competitors and the marketplace in general. By gaining critical competitive insights into the patent landscape, you can better identify disruptive innovation opportunities to increase revenues and create competitive roadblocks.All of this points to the need for comprehensive and proactive IP management. A good IP management program results in a patent portfolio that maximizes a technology’s strength and leverages it to protect and expand market share and increase profitability. This requires sophisticated, technology-based analytics that can reveal the full IP landscape, put patents into context, and deliver, real, actionable business intelligence at the beginning of corporate strategy formulation.
Critical business decisions involving technology and product development as well as mergers and acquisitions must be based on timely and accurate business information, especially IP evaluation – yours, the competition’s, or the target’s, as the case may be. Systematic data gathering, management, and analysis of the marketplace and the IP landscape is now known as “business intelligence” and intellectual property analytics can provide a great deal of intelligence about a competitor’s or acquisition target’s strategy.
With the right analytical tools, you can:
Identify competitors or collaborators Subject search results can be visualized with patent landscape maps (see below) to compare gross numbers of patents held by competing companies and their positions in the marketplace. Results can also be weighted in a number of ways to reveal competitive strength, such as in favor of inventions with counterpart filings in other countries, since that might suggest a larger R&D budget and greater technology value than an invention protected in a single country. Finding complementary IP through subject searches can uncover potential collaborators and strategic partners to help block competitors and gain greater marketshare.
Accurately analyze patent quality Patent citation has long been a traditional way of assessing IP value – the more a patent is cited, the more valuable and important it is. However, simple citation counting offers limited insight into the true worth of a patent and reveals little if anything about the relationship between patents. It’s more important to evaluate patents in context. At IPVision, our Relative Citation Frequency process not only looks at the number of citations given to a specific patent, but ranks that patent in comparison to all others of similar age in the same technology category. This process accurately qualifies the citation count based on patent age and technology segment far beyond simple citation counting.
Understand IP relationships better through interactive patent mapping Unlike traditional static patent maps, interactive maps provide a much richer, dynamic context for patent analysis. They can better reveal citation references to and from single patents or sets of patents and show legally-related patent filings and grants across priority and legal relationships.
As a bonus, mapping technologies by patent classifications and filings from specific countries is a great way to analyze developing markets, track the birth of new technologies, and discover market trends.
(NOTE: Our exclusive interactive patent map visualization tools are unique to the industry – they make it easy to understand the technology landscape and the relationship between patents. Unlike traditional static patent maps, our interactive maps provide a much richer, dynamic context for patent analysis.)
A good IP manager must communicate well with stakeholder groups in your organization and have a complete understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the IP portfolio to capitalize on it strategically and profitably. Intellectual property analysis using sophisticated, technology-based analytics is the key to discovering true IP value.
