The First Step in Developing Insights is Learning to See

In any competitor, technology or business assessment, it is important to first define the landscape. The best landscapes are simple, visual and understandable. This article discusses our perception of the minimal yet highly effective components of an insightful IP landscape.

Beyond a competent patent search, cutting-edge analytics and expert review are needed to create and interpret a summary snapshot of an IP landscape. But if management can't understand or act on the insights, what's the point? To grab a business stakeholder's attention and inform them effectively, IP landscapes must highlight who the key players are, when those players have been active, what they are focusing on, how they are protecting their inventions, and even in some cases why they are pursuing a specific innovation or protection strategy.

What follows are the basic elements of a highly effective, business-centric IP Landscape.

Identity of Key Players

An IP landscape begins with a precise, well-designed search strategy to identify the dominant and emerging players owning assets of interest. Special attention must be paid to identifying assignees that might not be listed on patent applications. At Perception Partners, we identify these assignees indirectly through association with inventor or attorney names on the application, or through other means such as assignments to other related family members. Proper identification of ownership improves ranking of leaders and laggards by portfolio size.

Portfolio Size

Counting the number of patents and applications for each assignee in the landscape provides an understanding of which portion of each portfolio contains newer pending applications versus older issued patents. The time frame and specific national patent offices used in the analysis must be carefully defined for the landscape to be meaningful.




Innovation Activity

Knowing when companies are investing in a specific technology area can provide insights into their past and current business strategy. For example, is one assignee relying on old patents only, signaling that it may be either exiting the market, or at least intending to find competitive advantage in areas other than technology? Or are there small companies entering the market that previously had been "off the radar"? Could either of these trends suggest opportunities for partnering or potential technology acquisition? Note that when using patent data, there are up to three dates that can be used: the priority date, the application date and the issue (publication) date.




Innovation and Portfolio Focus

Any given technology area can be further categorized into constituent sub-technologies to reveal the specific focus and competencies of key players. At Perception Partners, our subject matter experts build a taxonomy of categories, and use our in-house tools to rapidly assign patents within the landscape to these categories. Visualization as shown below might suggest "white-space" opportunities where no major players are competing, opportunities to extend technical dominance in a specific area, or approaches for partnering that might enable a company to catch-up or even leapfrog the competition in a designated area.




Portfolio Quality

Simple ranking of assignees based upon quantity is useful, but it doesn't give us the full picture. A question often remains: how strong are the portfolios for each assignee? At Perception Partners, we have developed algorithms to measure patent quality by assessing the likelihood that the patent is valid. Specifically, we evaluate how carefully the patent has been scrutinized by the prosecution team, including examiners, attorneys, inventors and assignees. It's often surprising to find that some assignees with relatively small portfolios may nonetheless have exceptionally high quality patents, e.g., for Assignee #5 below.


Claims Similarity

Finally, a competitive assessment of a technology landscape should provide some indication of the relevance of a competitor's IP portfolio to that of the company in question. That is, in addition to knowing the details of competitive portfolios, it is useful to identify which competitors are pursuing a similar innovation focus in similar terms, or alternatively, companies that might be good partners because of their complementary portfolios. Perception Partners uses special tools for text mining and analysis to measure the degree of similarity in claims language between a company and others in an IP landscape.


See Integrated Insights at a Glance

Although hundreds or even thousands of patents may be gathered and analyzed in a Perception Partners IP Landscape, all of the information described above can be integrated into a single-page overview that immediately highlights the most promising opportunities or looming threats that deserve more focused analysis.

Please contact us to learn more about the Perception Partners IP Landscape analysis approach, or consider taking advantage of our limited offer below. Allow us to help you quickly understand the opportunities and risks in your area of interest.