Strategic planning for intellectual property market research

In today’s rapidly growing IP market research and development, strategic planning methods are very effective in advancing a company’s or company’s future insights and goals. Competitive intelligence, primary research, secondary research, patent portfolio analysis, and landscape preparation are the main key steps for market research related to the IP domain.

If a company has more patents and licensed technologies compared to other competitors in an emerging technology sector, the chances of that company’s revenue growth will rise sharply.

To conduct effective IP market research, researchers must follow a strategically planned path, as explained below.

1. Diagnosis of the topic or problem

– First make sure what kind of issue is going to be dealt with.

– Diagnose the issue or problem using data mining and extraction tools such as patent databases, non-patent literature search.

2. Analysis and Interpretation of the topic or problem

– Find some possible gaps or issues in the analysis of the patent portfolio.

– Make a landscape search related to the technological advance of already extracted topics.

– Try to interpret these searches to find a single solution or future goal.

3. Prepare a work plan or policy

– Determine a workflow or policy based on previously searched results.

– Have some necessary discussions with IP and business experts.

4. Optimization of the work plan or policy through the selection of main objectives

– Add top goals to workflow or policy, so you can easily optimize your work plan with balanced future goals.

– Set the objectives in a well-defined way, according to their nature of operational mode.

5. Preparation for the initiation step or goal

– Start the investigation using all the necessary tools, such as the patent landscape report, portfolio analysis report, competitive intelligence alerts, etc.

– Most of the time, the initiation step or goal should be broad in its form. For example, FTO search and patent landscaping search are mostly needed in an IP market research. Therefore, it will be easy for IP experts to make a confident decision about the next plan or step.

6. Estimation of costs and financial needs

– Profitability is a necessary objective for business success. It is a primary concern for all researchers, so they must take it into account.

– Compare the invention or technology in question with other similar products from companies or competing companies.

7. Establishment of the control and monitoring plan

– Develop a strategy to control and monitor the effectiveness of the entire plan during their working time.

– Finalize the written work plan or policy using the extracted results.

– To find a meaningful result or solution, merge all the results from various analyzes and interpretations, such as novelty search, patent validation or invalidation search, freedom to operate search, landscape analysis, patent portfolio, etc