Competitive and Technical Intelligence ToolBox

Innography delivers intellectual property business intelligence software as a service that enables companies to better manage, protect and exploit their patent portfolios. By uniquely correlating patent data with key business information, Innography instantly generates visual insights so users can rapidly access and apply meaningful results when engaged in patent licensing, market analysis, competitive intelligence, freedom to operate, invalidation, due diligence and other related activities.

This is great site providing information on technical, business, management, organization, strategies, processes and innovation intelligence, its importance and various tools and techniques. It will enhance your learning, just have a look once!

In today’s competitive environment, success in the market depends primarily on strategic planning, early decision and understanding the competitors. Competitive intelligence provides knowledge of competitors, their marketing strategies, objectives, research activity, their strengths and weaknesses and other information. Competitor Analysis helps companies in understanding their position with respect to major competitors in the global competitive environment and provides actionable business competitive intelligence. Early and better understanding of the key competitors’ strategies helps to take proactive, planned and informed strategies business and R&D decisions in order to gain market dominance. Competitive intelligence is the process of discovering, analyzing and using intelligence from publicly available, non-proprietary information sources for the purpose of becoming more competitive. Competitive intelligence isn't simply about finding information. It's not about snoopi...

Patent literature is a valuable source of scientific information, and, while research published in journals is overproportionally cited in patents dealing with biotechnological and pharmaceutical inventions compared to the rest of the patent literature, the reverse is unfortunately not true. A recent study concluded that only 0.25% of articles covering all biological sciences (referenced in the Science Citation Index from 1998) cite patents. An obvious reflection of this neglect is the lack of a specific reference style format for patents in the instructions for authors of most biomedical journals, presumably because only few people ever ask for it. While this ignorance of patents as an information source might be considered to be a bigger problem in engineering and material sciences, a recent comment in Nature pointed out that some patents contain more detailed information than the corresponding scientific papers (in this case it was about stem cell technology). Click to read full ar...

Presentation from the Infonortics conference, Philadelphia, PA, June 27-28, 2005 * Ensuring Successful Technology Insertion: It’s Not About Technology (Only) * Consolidating and Defining Relationships between Data Sets * Filling the Analysis Gap: Creating an Information Advantage for the Enterprise * How End-Users Combine High Recall Search Tools with Visualization * Increasing the Value of Sci-Tech Intelligence through Enhanced Visualization * Using Visualization and Data Mining to Decipher Chemical and Biological Data * Mining and Visualization of Patent Information for R&D Strategy: Lessons Learned * Intelligence Tools for Better and Faster Reading and Analysis of Retrieved Data * Commercial ROI of Text-Mining Research * Extracting Actionable Intelligence from Text Flows and Stocks * Beyond Search * Analysis of Structured and Unstructured Data: Responding to Trends, Improving Productivity and Better Allocating Resource * Unified Analytics: Unstructured Text + Enterprise Data = ...

The use of patents in technology forecasting is made possible by advancement in computer technologies. Processing hundreds even thousand of records now can be done easily and fairly quickly.Patents are structured documents . As the technology develop, especially in the area of artificial intelligence, the document processing can move toward the unstructured document processing. Read full article

Patents are a very useful source of technical information. The public availability of patents over the Internet, with for some databases (eg. Espacenet) the assurance of a constant format, allows the development of high value added products using this information source and provides an easy way to analyze patent information. This simple and powerful tool facilitates the use of patents in academic research, in SMEs and in developing countries providing a way to use patents as a ideas resource thus improving technological innovation. Read full article

Patent analysis provides an overview of innovation and a method to track technological development • Patent counts, weighting, normalisation • Macro analysis; Micro analysis • Insight •• Technology trends •• Geographic trends •• Company trends • Important for: •• Competitive intelligence •• Mergers and acquisitions, R&D strategy etc. •• Prediction and exploitation of emerging technology •• Licensing opportunities Important point to remember: • Search strategy is key • Understanding of codes and classifications is important • Clean-up of the data is desirable • Useful techniques: •• Normalisation •• Averaging counts over time • Qualification •• Geographic spread •• Citation frequency •• Legal status • Patent analysis can be valuable for highlighting areas for further study and corroboration

The collection and retrieval of patent publications is a critical component of the company’s intellectual property strategy and, quite suitably, becomes work done by a specialist. Within many organizations, patent information specialists have the responsibility for determining how patent information is best made available and how it’s best used within their organizations in a strategic manner. In addition to technical literature, books and conferences/seminars, patents are a very important source of information for managers, scientists and technicians involved in research, development and in bringing forward new products and processes. Indeed 80% of what is published in patents isn’t published elsewhere. Successful innovation is thus inseparable from the proper use of patent information, both concerning the legal-patent aspects as well as the technical-scientific aspects of the innovation process. Dutch based GO opleidingen organizes a training program in which these challenges will be...

"Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of monitoring the competitive environment. CI enables senior managers in companies of all sizes to make informed decisions about everything from marketing, R&D, and investing tactics to long-term business strategies. Effective CI is a continuous process involving the legal and ethical collection of information, analysis that doesn't avoid unwelcome conclusions, and controlled dissemination of actionable intelligence to decision makers." The technology landscape is becoming more competitive every day. Understanding the competitor's business, marketing, research and technological progress and ultimately their strengths and weakness is the first step to gain competency in the market. Competitive and technological intelligence reports at Dolcera (www.dolcera.com) can help you identify your close competitors, expose their vulnerabilities, predict their capabilities, and show you the white spaces to improve your standings in...

Patents are intellectual property (IP) that may need to be appraised for accounting, tax, litigation and transactional purposes in situations that include divorce or bankruptcy actions, estate settlements, sales of businesses and company mergers (which might require valuing portfolios of inventions). In an article in Journal of Accountancy, J. Timothy Cromley has disclosed detailed information on " 20 Steps for Pricing a Patent ". 1. Check whether the patent is in force 2. Identify the context. 3. Gather information 4. Assemble a valuation team. 5. Read the patent. 6. Investigate the patent’s scope. 7. Talk with a patent attorney. 8. Inquire about the patent’s validity. 9. Inquire into blocking patents. 10. Consider synergies among patents. 11. Investigate foreign patent protection. 12. Consider the remaining life of the patent. 13. Analyze any prior royalties paid for the patent. 14. Inquire into any actual or threatened litigation involving the patent. 15. Identify...

Researchers engaged in competitive intelligence,knowledge management, patent research, often involve in gathering, delivery and application of quality information to make it into actionable intelligence for sound decision-making. The process is complex, and requires expert knowledge and professional competence through a number of steps to ensure quality results. Gaulin's 8 A's of information might help you out.. The 8 A's OF INFORMATION ARTICULATING the information need ANTICIPATING information needs (Prism Thinking) AWARENESS of information resources (Spheres of Information) ACCESS to the information resources ACQUIRING the information ASSIMILATING the information APPLYING the information ASSESSING the information's impact Read Full article

NML Gateway is must of all professional and research scholar, who are engaged in technical knowledge mining and intelligence. It consists of a lots of informations, tools which a patent analyst can use for gathering variety of information to creating highly valuable and actionable technological intelligence reports.

Because of recent changes in the law, an existing patent can fall in one of three categories in terms of its expiration date. If the patent application was filed after June 7, 1995, the expiration date is 20 years from the date it was filed. If the application was filed by June 7, 1995 and issued before June 8, 1978, the expiration date is 17 years from issuance. The “best-of-both-worlds clause” comes into effect if the application was filed by June 7, 1995 and issued after June 7, 1978, in which case the term is the later of 17 years from issuance or 20 years from filing. These terms are accurate for both Utility and Plant Patents, Design Patents expire 14 years from the date of grant. The filing date is determined depends on whether the application is for a provisional or non-provisional patent. For a provisional patent application: “The filing date of a provisional application is the date on which a written description of the invention, drawings if necessary, and the name of the...

The following link provides a good tutorial on use of pivot tables for data analysis. Pivot Table Tutorial

Cpearson's page contains list of most of the excel formula, which can aid after patent ananlysis and data sorting for creating IP maps.