Strategic Patent Intelligence

• Published date: 25 May 2022
• Subject Matter: Intellectual Property, Patent
• Law Firm: Cipher
• Author: Mr Nigel Swycher

What have we learnt over 2000 years that can help us improve our understanding of patent portfolios?

"Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated." Sun Tzu

Patent teams in a post-COVID world are being challenged to evaluate and communicate their patent strategy and many are under significant budget pressure. This is where Cipher, a fresh approach to strategic patent intelligence (SPI) can help meet that challenge head on. In so doing patent teams can establish a clear competitive advantage and be well positioned for the economic recovery.

Competitive Intelligence as an early warning system

Many businesses are just waking up to the importance of competitive intelligence (CI) relating to patents. There again, business CI only really began in the 1980s with Michael Porter's publication of Competitive-Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors - widely regarded as the foundation of modern competitive intelligence and voted into the top ten most influential management books of the 20th century.

Over the last 40 years competitive intelligence (CI) has become ubiquitous, and all companies include this as a critical input into business strategy. However, in the patent world, it is has taken a lot longer for CI to be embedded and in a recent survey around 30% of companies reported that awareness of patents did not extend very far beyond the legal department (Source: Cipher Report on Portfolio Optimisation).

This is a call to arms. All companies need to harness the intelligence locked inside patents to help reduce the risk posed by other people's and to benefit from what patents can tell you about the products, technologies and plans of those the million+ companies investing in the protection of innovation.

Patent analytics in support of strategic decision making

Competitive intelligence can be defined as the business function responsible for the early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious. For strategic patent intelligence this includes:

• Benchmarking: being able to understand and communicate the importance of your patent portfolio by reference to organisations owning patents in the same areas,
• Budgeting: an objective and repeatable way of communicating the investment in patents by reference to current and future business strategy (explored in Beyond Portfolio Optimisation),
• Technology Trends: monitoring the global landscape for movement towards or away from...