How a Consulting Firm Uses IP Landscape Analysis to Strengthen Its Clients’ Business Strategies

Get insights into the future with IP landscape analysis to strengthen your organization’s competitive advantage and growth potential.

“Conducting a patent landscape analysis was an incredibly valuable experience for me. It opened my eyes to what is possible and how to find information. It helped me to contextualize much of what I see coming from competitors through a different lens.”

Michael Currin, CEO, PixelBlue Innovations

What is a patent landscape?

A patent landscape provides a snapshot of the current patent space of a specific technology in a given company, region, or globally. It informs competitive analysis, research planning, marketing strategies and product development. By exploring what technologies companies are investing in and protecting, IP landscape analyses provide a window into the future.

“Conducting patent landscaping for a client is an opportunity to communicate information that can profoundly impact their success in business,” explains Perlberg. 

PixelBlue Innovations, an innovative indoor farming company, had recently secured a Series A investment. It was preparing to launch its first product in a multinational marketing campaign. Before the launch CEO Michael Currin reached out to Perl IP Consulting LLC, a full-service consulting firm focused on IP development and management. He felt he needed strategic insights to guide his company’s impending product launch and expansion plans. Early in the discussion, it became apparent to the Perl IP team that an IP risk analysis, with respect to the countries that Currin was planning to expand to, had not been conducted.

In consulting with Currin, Perl IP founder Gil Perlberg, who draws from his own expansive experience with product development that includes roles as VP of IP at a semiconductor company and COO at a consumer products business, and his colleague Bradley Schmidt recommended conducting an IP landscape. This will help to better understand the company’s competitive situation and fully prepare them for their first big launch.

“It would be catastrophic to have launched in a new territory only to receive ‘Cease & Desist’ notices for potential patent infringement,” said Schmidt. Realizing the complexities of the markets his company was about to enter, Currin requested an extensive IP landscape analysis.

Developing a reliable patent landscape requires a trustworthy data source

Patent landscapes aim to instill clients with a thorough understanding of their technical fields and help them make wise decisions about investing their time and money. Because of this Perlberg and Schmidt need to be sure they are working with the most exhaustive database out there, including patent data from patent offices around the world. 

Bradley Schmidt
Consultant
Perl IP Consulting LLC

“Developing a genuinely reliable patent landscape requires data from many sources around the world. Patent data comes from filed patents, which contain a rich set of metadata that can be analyzed over time, allowing for robust comparisons between entities. Using incomplete or incorrect data can potentially jeopardize your clients’ future.”

Understanding the evolution of a technology field

Patent landscape analysis not only offers a snapshot of the innovation happening in a particular technological field at any given time, it can also tell the story of where technology is going, who is most involved and where innovation is taking place.
LexisNexis® PatentSight+™ can provide the answers to these questions. And it includes objective, scientifically backed metrics that measure the impact of patented inventions and the strength of entire patent portfolios.

For Perl IP, understanding which companies have been seeking patent protection around the world is a two-fold benefit:

1. Guide PixelBlue Innovations’ competitive intelligence decisions by making clear which competitors are the biggest and best-positioned competitors
2. Identify potential partnerships or licensees that would allow them to monetize their patent rights

LexisNexis PatentSight+ charts help dissect, splice and present data to provide insights that are not readily available from other sources.” Schmidt describes.

Decision-making supported by landscape analysis

This information has been vital for Perl IP to assist their clients with strategy development, business plans and investor pitch decks. Here are some examples of decision-making areas that can be supported by a landscape analysis:

• What is the current industry growth trajectory?
• What are the technology trends in this field
• Who is innovating? And where?
• Who are the development mavericks in this technology field?
• Who are some of the potential strategic partners?
• Is it a litigious environment?
• Are there any roadblocks?
• Are there white spaces in the market?
• What is the next big thing in this technology?
• Industry pivots
• A complete list of competitors in the market

Gil Perlberg
Founder
Perl IP Consulting LLC

“Using PatentSight, we are able to conduct IP landscape analyses that include citation analyses of citations received by patents made during patent examinations in different countries. The PatentSight data team takes the data analysis one step further by harmonizing patent ownership information. With various ready-made charts and table options, PatentSight offers unique capabilities to dissect, splice and present complex patent metadata.” 

Presenting the results of the analysis to the client

When Perl IP presented the IP landscape analysis for agricultural technologies to Currin at PixelBlue Innovations, he was amazed at what the information revealed.

The list of competitors included many companies which he had never heard of. 

Currin was very surprised, as he had previously conducted an extensive competitive analysis. Using the PatentSight+ AI-powered technology cluster feature, the Perl IP team first isolated relevant technology categories. Then, to avoid missing any relevant competitor, the scope of the search was further widened using another feature that employs AI, the citation-based search expansion tool PatentSight Similarity Search. Next this list was narrowed down using customizable search filters for specific territories, owner names, co-owner names and inventor names. As a result, this saved the Perl IP team considerable effort that would have otherwise gone into non-value-adding tasks. Once they were convinced with the search results, they leveraged PatentSight+ proprietary value indicators to reveal the most important competitors in the markets Currin was looking to expand.

He did not realize that several large companies were expanding into this space. 

Another salient feature of LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions patent data is that patents are traced and assigned to the entity that holds the ultimate commercial rights for those technologies. Once the right data is in place, with charts showing the various technology segments each company focuses on, it becomes easy for Perl IP to identify the ones that might be a threat to Currin’s company.

He was not aware of many Chinese startups that were filing patents in this domain. 

The broad coverage of global patent databases within the LexisNexis dataset ensures that patents from around the world can be accessed for analysis. The team that works on harmonizing this data is multi-lingual, ensuring reliable data is captured from patents filed in many languages. This includes English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Russian.

He did not realize that the analysis could identify the “type” of participants in this field.

For example, are they companies, individuals, academic institutions or non-practicing entities, aka “trolls.” The PatentSight+ database contains information about patent owners that classifies them according to their type of business activity. This information is particularly helpful when making strategic decisions to minimize business risk, especially if a company is planning to go into a market with many active patent trolls.

As a veteran in his field, Currin was confident that he knew his competitors and understood their technology. Also, he thought he knew exactly where they had filed their patents and had designed the product launches to avoid any IP conflicts.

Get ahead, stay ahead—with advanced patent analytics

Conducting an IP landscape analysis gives Perl IP’s clients an edge. Perlberg expands, “Whether launching a new product or expanding your existing markets to foreign ones, it’s always essential to consider an IP landscape analysis to better understand the players and the current state of innovation in the market.”

Intellectual property is complex. It is hard to explain its importance to the business. ​PatentSight+ is an intelligent patent analytics solution. It can empower the IP department to be a strategic advisor to the business. Decision makers gain truly valuable insights that enable them to stay ahead of the innovation curve. Also, they can assess and minimize exposure to risk and identify business opportunities.

The PatentSight+ service provides unparalleled insights that support key IP department activities. This includes portfolio optimization, benchmarking, competitive intelligence, and more. The data team combines best-in-class content with proprietary enrichments, advanced algorithms and powerful visualizations. Advanced patent analytics powered by PatentSight can help your organization:

• Build a competitive advantage by assessing the evolving technology landscape
• Spend less time cleaning and curating data sets, including your proprietary information
• Generate new insights with easy access to unique and highly sophisticated analyses
• Effectively communicate with powerful insights and visualizations

Unlock the true value of your portfolio

Learn how to profit from sound patent analysis.

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• Let’s have a conversation about your current priorities in IP analytics.
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