Competitors understand your business the best” – As the saying goes, it suggests that one must never neglect the importance of having thorough knowledge of their fellow competitors. The marketplace has become highly competitive over the past few decades as new ideas pour in.
Staying ahead of your competitors has become necessary. Industries hope to receive critical analytical information from their R&D investments that will help them develop new business models and products to launch in this highly competitive market.
Are you unclear about how to do that? Do you want to know what will help you stay ahead of the competition? If yes, then you have come to the right place!
The Research & Development sector is booming at a rapid speed and is considered to be the backbone of every industry. Every business wants to stand out of the crowd, and having details about the production, processing, and sales of your competitors will help you in this.
This is where competitive landscaping plays its role. Landscape analysis is a complex business analysis method that identifies the possible direct and indirect competitors that share a similar vision or have the same target audience, in a structured manner.
This involves detailed research into the competitor’s production, processing, sales, and marketing operations to address their possible limitations which can be used for the contender’s benefit. Competitive Landscape Analysis ultimately gives an edge over the competition and study which will have advantage for the organization to scale up its business in future.
Below we discuss how such competitive analysis can help your business reach new heights of success
1) Competitive landscape analysis is a broad term that comprises of numerous different kinds of strategies and techniques implemented to gain in depth knowledge of the competition in the market.
One such important technique is the determination of the patent licensing strategies used by the fellow competitors which gives an insight into their direction of efforts which leads to innovation.
2) The patent landscape of your competitor provides crucial information on the upcoming innovations the company might have invested in along with the technology they used to make it possible.
Such information derived from patent landscape analysis enables research institutions, large corporations, businesses, and startups to make well-informed and practical decisions before investing in the development of a, particularly innovative product.
Having prior knowledge of the competition in the market always comes in handy while making important investment decisions when looking forward to an innovative idea.
3) It is always best to ensure that your idea is highly unique and is different from the already available similar products, isn’t it?
The business, legal, and technology information extracted from competitor patent portfolios can also help in recognizing and understanding their IP expansion strategies.
Such an IP landscape of the competitors can provide an understanding of their direction of technology, strategic decisions they have invested in, as well as details of their future products.
It allows the corporations to plan out their mergers and acquisitions for their possible business ventures.
4) One significant benefit of competitor patent search is that it allows them to identify and assess possible licensing opportunities along with the prediction of its financial sense.
5) Want to know whether your product is new and hasn’t been launched by anyone else yet? While investing in integral IP decisions, large corporations and research institutions usually take the assistance of prior art search strategy for this purpose.
This technique is undertaken to acknowledge whether an innovation is new and unique or not. It identifies the possibility of an invention to be previously described in other available references.
This is important because it helps in the generation of ideas for R&D, to make financial R&D investment cost-effective and precise, evaluation of the proposed technology, avoid redundancy and duplicity, and develop new state-of-the-art technological innovations in this highly competitive marketplace.
6) The IP landscape analysis allows the business to ensure the novelty and non-obviousness of their innovative product before investing in its development.
Such patent landscape analysis provides details about the current patent filing trends that benefit the marketing operations allowing them to assess the commercial stage of the product or technology.
In legal terms, this analysis technique identifies patent protection for the competitors and the wide patent claim language which might hinder the patent filing process of the innovative product or technology, the company is looking forward to investing in.
It also allows them to understand the relationship between patent protection and the available competitive products in the market.
7) Competitive landscape analysis gives an opportunity to perform ‘white-space analysis’ that gives information on which patents are not being maintained by their companies and how many of them have already expired.
This is highly beneficial for the developers as it tells how open a technological domain is at present.
Competitive landscape analysis plays an integral role in the growth and development of any business as it encourages the developers to significantly communicate across departments and introduce an effective business plan.
The generation of multiple ideas and a look inside the available competition in the marketplace can significantly aid the development of an upcoming innovation.
Patentskart is an IP support service firm that offers next-generation visualization models that helps in the identification of latest competitor trends, technology whitespace, Relative Growth (CAGR) in Competitor Patent Portfolios, licensing target identification, and in the determination of hottest R&D locations & leading Markets across generations.