Competitive intelligence is usually conducted by marketing teams and less often by patent professionals, but why is that exactly? Competitive intelligence results when a company gathers and analyzes information on its industry, the business environment, competitors, and competitive products and services to develop strategies and identify competitive gaps. Patents happen to be one of the most important instruments for maintaining a commercial edge over competitors. Patent professionals are arguably the best suited to identify what is known about competitor patent portfolios and identify the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that exist in a particular patent landscape. The LexisNexis® PatentSight® innovation analytics platform provides power and ease to patent professionals throughout all phases of the competitive intelligence process and provides the ability to transform patent data into intelligence.
Patent data collection for competitive intelligence has always been notoriously difficult. There are over 100 patent authorities around the world, and nearly as many patent databases containing an unfathomable number of patent documents. Considering that many companies file for patent protection using varied name spellings or through their subsidiaries, pooling all of the worldwide patent documents that fall under a single company’s umbrella can be daunting using traditional methods.
When patent professionals use PatentSight® for their competitive intelligence analyses, they can access patent documents and data for over 13 million patent families around the world. PatentSight records are even reviewed to find ownership inconsistencies and corporate relationships among patent owners to help ensure that users have more complete and accurate patent family information to consider and interpret.
The beauty of data analytics is that patent data can be transformed into meaningful information that informs business strategy. PatentSight makes this transformation nearly automatically—all that is required of patent professionals is to choose which data sets should be considered and what kind of information they would like to extract. Choose to analyze patent documents based on ownership information, document text, date ranges, patent authorities, specific IPC classification, and many other conditions. PatentSight can then generate Smart Reports or custom tables and charts that communicate key competitive information. Benchmarking reports can be designed to identify major competitors and patent trends for different technologies. Users can even generate full 360-degree company profiles for their competitors or home in on a competitors’ information in a specific technological field.
Once PatentSight produces valuable insights for its users, it is time for patent professionals to interpret what the collected competitive intelligence means for their clients. Not only can patent practitioners identify key competitors, they can also assess competitor portfolio strengths and weaknesses, patent filing trends and the geographic areas where their patents are active. A keen eye can use PatentSight to identify opportunities for collaboration with other businesses, as well as new and disruptive technologies that could present new business opportunities for clients.
In summary, a business’s leverage over others is often defined by the quality and quantity of its patents. Patent professionals are uniquely qualified to interpret patent information to provide critical competitive intelligence to their clients. PatentSight patent analysis tools help professionals transform patent data into intelligence from global patent archives, and patent professionals can in turn help their clients make better business decisions.
Learn more about PatentSight and the Patent Asset Index.
Excellent data quality is the foundation of reliable analyses. Learn how PatentSight enhances patent data here.
Access the use case Using the Patent Asset Index for Patent Portfolio Benchmarking to see why an in-depth analysis of patent information is irreplaceable when benchmarking the best practices in Intellectual Property management.
Read Using the Patent Asset Index for Company Portfolio Evaluations to learn how company portfolio evaluations can inform key business decisions.
