Saturday, December 8, 2012

How Patent Landscaping Can Help in Making Right Decisions About Research and Development Investments


1) Do the market evaluation a. A market evaluation is the first step towards taking decisions whether to jump into the market or not. In market evaluation companies must look into the number of products already exists in the market to know how crowded the opportunity is. Companies must also look into what are the features in the products and see if some white spaces available. There are number of distributors in the world who sells products, companies must have data of these distributors and seller companies to know how they are going to distribute the product if they make it. There are many other factors which can also be take into account like - In which countries which products are successful and what is the current and future market potential of the product in that country, also what are the regulatory norms of a particular country if a product has to be launched etc.

2) Do patent landscape a. See what is there in the patents market. There are number of technologies there which are still available for licensing and some are being already licensed. Try to figure out some trends i.e. past, present and future trends. Note that there is less chances of getting noticed if you use past technologies. Also see if you are investing in present technology what will be your timeline of making the product, make sure that when you launch the product it should meet the standards of the technologies of that time, not of the time when you decided to invest. Make sure that you always eye on future technologies and also investments already going in these technologies. b. See if you find any strong patent in the area of small company and the patent is still available for licensing. You can look for a merger or an acquisition or licensing of that company. Doing this will help your company reducing R&D costs of development. c. See how major players in the market go after the technology advancements. Are they using old technologies and still generating revenues? OR they have rapidly switched to newer technologies. See if there are any new players planning to come in the market or not.

3) Search white spaces and evaluate their opportunities and costs a. See how crowded the patent landscape is. How many players are already there with how many patents? Note that large number of patents will increase the probability of having patent lawsuits in future. Do a freedom to operate search well before launching the product to avoid this possibility. Through categorization of patents figure out where patenting activity is less and how you can use the white spaces available. Here, we have to make sure that figuring out white spaces does not guarantee that you product will sell. You have to simultaneously figure out market potential of that white space. b. See the SWOT of the patent landscape, with the help of the SWOT analysis you will know what can be the factors like environmental, social etc. which can effect/make strong your advancement in particular technology. c. Calculate the costs of R&D efforts.

4) Match the market evaluation and patent landscape results a. Match white spaces from each. b. See if the match is taking results in fruitful directions or not. If not try to figure out why the results are not matching. May be companies with larger portfolios in the technological area are still not active/don't have any product in the market.

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