Patent publications can signal many things, including emergent technologies, companies, and competitors. Various analytical and visualization techniques are available to help spot those signals more easily. For example, we offer a "watch" service that can provide you with periodic reports of new patent publications that mention a specific keyword, are classified within an identified technical field, and/or are associated with a particular company, inventor, or earlier patent publication. Comparing visualizations for different points in time can allow important changes to be identified, such as emergent technical trends, inventors, and/or patent owners.
For example, by tracking inventors associated with patent documents linked to a given patent owner over time, we can identify not only that company's most prolific inventors, but also its emerging ones. We can even determine who in that company probably knows the most about a given concept. Such insights can be invaluable when seeking to attract the "best and brightest" to join your company.
As another example, by tracking the concepts described in a competitor's patent publications, we can discern that company's strategic initiatives, including those of greatest threat to your company, often long before those strategies become apparent in the marketplace. Such timely awareness can allow your company to take appropriate counter-measures, such as innovating blocking concepts and filing patent applications that "wall-off" the competitor, potentially encouraging them to abandon their threatening research and development efforts.
By tracking recent entrants to a field of particular interest to your company, we can help you spot innovative start-ups and small competitors that might make good acquisition or investment targets. Partnering with and/or purchasing such businesses, or licensing their innovations, can help you rapidly improve your product and/or service offerings, with much lower risks of R&D failures. Investing in such firms can provide you with opportunities to guide nascent technologies while earning above-market returns.
Analyzing the patent publications of potential suppliers can help your company learn of potential solutions to longstanding market needs long before those suppliers are ready to offer completed solutions to the marketplace, including your competitors. Thus, by joining forces with such suppliers while they are still honing their innovations for the marketplace, you can guide the supplier to providing an optimized solution for your needs and those of your customers. Moreover, you potentially can secure an exclusive licensing arrangement with that supplier, such that your competitors are locked-out from accessing that supplier's valuable innovations or competing directly against your solutions.
A careful review of the relevant patent landscape can help you identify those patents that your current and/or potential products and/or services might infringe. With such patents identified, further analysis, such as via our powerful, patent-pending, document analysis tool, can identify whether any patents of concern have sufficient vulnerabilities to allow you to proceed with much reduced infringement liability risk, or whether cost-effective design-arounds, or possibly taking a license, might be the more prudent approach. We also can research the litigation history of a given patent owner, to learn whether they are likely to ignore, negotiate with, or attack perceived infringers.
For more information, check out our free guide, "Empowering Intellectual Property – Step 3 – Survey".