Start with a search: six simple steps
Although exploiting your own patent portfolio effectively can be an excellent basis on which to build business decisions and strategy, it is not sufficient to know and understand only your own portfolio.
In this increasingly competitive and global world, understanding your competitors’ patent portfolios and how they compare to your own is critical for business survival. The rate at which new inventions are being patented is ever-increasing, so the continuous monitoring of new patents is vital to ensure corporate success and financial stability when attempting to access new markets, exploit existing ones and when scoping the profitability of emerging products.
In addition, publicly available patent data is an excellent source of external ideas and information that can be used in the open innovation model to identify opportunities and threats to a business and improve its survivability and profitability in the modern marketplace.
This information is also of vital important to competitive intelligence, which makes use of public information to accrue data on competitors and the market environment to drive strategic decision-making.
A general approach to gathering competitor intelligence is as follows:
