Conduct Competitor Analysis With LexisNexis® PatentSight®

Patent professionals may fail to realize how much value they can add to their clients’ corporate strategies. After all, patent protection is often the centerpiece around which both offensive and defensive corporate strategies are built. The role of a patent practitioner is essential at all stages of strategic research. From broad, general research, including patent landscaping and providing competitive intelligence, to conducting a granular competitor analysis, patent professionals are able to gather and interpret information for clients that is critical for making informed business decisions. 

Competitor analysis: targeting and evaluating rivals

Where patent landscapes and competitive intelligence reports focus on viewing industries, technologies or groups of companies, a competitor analysis aims to produce a profile on a specific rival. More specifically, a competitor analysis is useful for evaluating a rival’s strengths and weaknesses. This rival may be known through their market participation or discovered through previous research efforts. Alternatively, competitors can be easily identified using modern tools like those available on the LexisNexis® PatentSight® innovation analytics platform. PatentSight® users can quickly generate a Smart Report to identify competitors using keywords, IPC classifications and other relevant search criteria. Users can even identify competitors with the PatentSight Similarity Search, which uses patent reference numbers to find similar patents around the world with similar classifications and citations. 

Once a specific competitor has been identified for deeper investigation, PatentSight provides several types of competitor-specific information worth considering, including: 

Patent strength and Competitive Impact

Identifying your rival’s most valuable patents is an important step for determining their strengths and weaknesses. PatentSight uses a science-backed algorithm for evaluating the strength of a patent. The resulting metric, a patent’s Competitive Impact, takes into account a patent’s significance by evaluating how many times it has been cited by subsequent patents, as well as the geographic territories where the patent is protected and the market size of those territories. Users can use Competitive Impact values to make normalized comparisons of patents around the world. 

Portfolio strength and Patent Asset Index 

The strength of a single patent is one thing, but how about the strength of a company’s entire patent portfolio? The PatentSight Patent Asset Index uses the Competitive Impact values of the patents within a portfolio to communicate the portfolio’s overall strength. The Patent Asset Index is ideal for comparing patent portfolio strengths among competitors and providing a reliable metric for identifying changes in portfolio strengths over time. 

Geographic Protection 

Patents are territory specific, so unless your rival has filed for protection with all patent authorities in the world, there will be limitations on where their exclusive patent rights exist. PatentSight intelligence is informed by patent records for over 13 million global patent families filed with patent authorities around the world. Users can use PatentSight patent data to identify the territories where specific inventions are protected and evaluate portfolio strengths in specific geographic regions. 

Patent trends and upcoming changes 

A snapshot of competitor information from a single moment in time leaves much to the imagination. It is when patent data is viewed over time that things start to get interesting. PatentSight allows users to track the evolution of rival patent strategies, including changes in portfolio sizes and strengths, global filing trends and even the expiration of their most valuable patents. By focusing on competitor trends and future expectations, patent professionals can help their clients come up with business tactics that will allow them to better function in their markets. 

PatentSight helps professionals provide corporate strategy services that can lead to greater client successes. Whether it be understanding a market’s landscape, identifying competitors or sizing up a rival, PatentSight offers the metrics and tools patent practitioners need to help fulfill their clients’ needs. 

Learn more about PatentSight and the Patent Asset Index.  

For more on Competitive Impact, read Tesla’s Shares Overtake General Motors’. How do their technologies differ?

For more on the Patent Asset Index read Autonomous Driving: How To Judge Strategic Partnerships. 

Discover the common issues affecting open source patent data and the PatentSight approach to data cleaning. 

This case study shows how an Intellectual Property law firm leverages PatentSight to make complex patent insights actionable by their client’s Senior Management. 

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