Friday, 30 July 2021

Customer Insights: Understand what drives your target market

 


Consumer insights look at the needs of your target market to describe why the market behaves the way it does. These insights can give your business an extensive understanding of consumer behavior, including personal consumer preferences and market trends.

Market research data, such as how many people in your target market would consider buying your product, isn't always sufficient to go on to product development and marketing. Your business also requires to know what drives that data. Consumer marketing insights help you recognize potential customers and make product and marketing decisions that win them over.

Consumer insights and market research

Market research collects data on consumer behavior using research methods such as interviews, focus groups, experiments, and surveys. This research type often generates quantitative and qualitative data, such as market demographics and consumer sentiment.

Market research results are usually either statistical or anecdotal. For instance, you may find that 55% of consumers think it's essential that your business donates to charity. In comparison, 31% think it's somewhat crucial—and some consumers may even recommend a specific charity.

Consumer insights look into market research results to explain the "why" behind a statistic. For example: why do consumers think it's essential for your business to donate to charity? Maybe your brand values align with a certain cause they want you to support. Perhaps they want to feel like they're creating a positive impact when they buy your products. 

How do you get consumer insights?

Every business requires consumer insights and even those with a bare-bones staff and budget can easily create them. Here's how you can find consumer insights in your research data:


1.      Conduct consumer insight research

Businesses with precise data are more likely to develop meaningful insights. Make well-informed conclusions about consumer behavior by diving into your target market's wants, attitudes, and buying behavior with consumer insight research. This type of market research helps you boost correlations between beliefs and buying behaviors.

Although there are many types of consumer insight research, surveys are usually the most versatile way to handle the consumer research questions—and they play a crucial role in more complex research methods such as focus groups and experiments. With surveys, your business can frequently collect data from a representative sample of your market.

There are two fundamental ways to extract consumer behavior insights from your research. You can either straight ask respondents for their insight or establish correlations between data points when your consumer insights research is complete. If you're using the initial method, ask follow-up questions that encourage participants to describe the reasoning behind their buying behavior. Survey logic can support this, as it lets you cover custom questions based on a respondent's previous answers.


2.      Extract consumer behavior insights from research data

Businesses often struggle to handle the information they collect from market research. To develop insights from consumer market research or analytics, you'll require to sift through big data to find the most important data points.

To recognize potential insights, arrange your data so that patterns appear in your participants' buying behavior. To manage big data sets, filter your responses to focus on patterns in smaller segments of your target market. This technique assists you in uncovering micro-trends and correlations and focuses on a more manageable pool of participants.


3.      Build consumer insights data

Consumer insights are only helpful in the hands of the people who know what to do with them. Make a clear impact on your business by sharing your significant consumer insights with co-workers or employees who will gain the most from your research. A shared database or report is an excellent way to make your insights available to anyone at your business who requires them.

New consumer insights help your business remain on top of market shifts, but consumer behavior data from the past can be just as helpful. Past insights are a considerable way to add context to future research questions and benchmark future insights, so hold onto the reports you make—the best consumer insights are those that your business can come back to now and then.

If executed properly, the insights you get from doing more solid customer research will help formulate your marketing strategy, brief your design decisions and guide your future business plans. Customer research should be done constantly as customer needs change or as competitors offer new features. We at Ingenious e-Brain have a wealth of experience measuring customer satisfaction on behalf of our clients, so if you require any assistance in carrying out this type of market research, please get in touch with us at services@iebrain.com.

A Guide To Patent Infringement Analysis


Patent infringement is using a patent for commercialization/Monetization purposes without the patent assignee permission or license. Patent infringement analysis determines the category of patent infringement, such as Literal infringement and Doctrine of equivalents.

 

  • Literal infringements: It happens when the accused firm copies the product as claimed in the patent. Two main specifications of literal infringement are: The function of the accused product is similar to the original patent. It is also identical in terms of material and structure.
  • The doctrine of equivalents: This includes any partial infringement. If any part of the accused product is accomplishing the same result through the same process, it covers the equivalents' doctrine. 

The steps for a patent infringement analysis are:

  1. Describe the claim in a patent thoroughly.
  2. Compare the claims and accused products to check for literal infringements.
  3. In case of no literal infringement, examine for infringement under the doctrine of equivalents.

The approach is to go into details of the claim as much as possible. In some cases, the complete drawing is similar, and any small part is claimed. The accused product can have multiple similarities with the original patent, but in case it's not violating the claim, It doesn't come under patent infringement.

Aside from literal infringement and the doctrine of equivalents, there are few more types of infringement based on the different violations.

· Direct infringement: If anyone sells, uses, or offers to sell a patent in the U.S.A without any authorization comes under direct infringement.

· Contributory infringement: Duplicating a part from a patented invention and then use or sell it comes under this infringement category.

· Process patent infringement: Importing any innovation in the U.S without the authority of the patent owner comes under process patent infringement.

· Litigation process after patent infringement analysis

Once the patent infringement analysis is done, courts have a two-step process to find out the result.

  1. Claim construction 
  2. The court governs whether the accused product infringes on the authentic patent.

Claim construction is the scenario when the court describes the claims made in the patent. During this process, the precise meaning of the term is considered. Although, it can be changed if the patent owner gave a different meaning to the term. Large firms focus on developing a patent claim construction to establish their position on the legal front.

The court judges the product depend on functionality. Any part in the claim is considered as a method to complete a function. It finishes the opportunity of the claim. If a meaning for a technical word is not clear, the court considers the meaning specified by experts or textbooks. In conclusion, claim construction is entirely under the court. However, parties can have a jury trial interrogate the court's interpretation of patent infringement. Moreover, there are specific ways to defend a patent infringement lawsuit.

Want to conduct a patent infringement analysis?

Ingenious e-Brain has more than 9 years of experience in the IP field. Our team covers possibly every technical domain. We go through every database to deliver accurate results. Also, the clients can examine the status of the work at any stage of the process. Most importantly, 100 % customer satisfaction is our top priority.

To know more, visit our service page: https://www.iebrain.com/services/ip-intelligence/infringement-analysis/.

Thursday, 29 July 2021

How Is AI Relevant For Due Diligence?

 


There is a constant apprehension that artificial intelligence will automate professional fields and create mass redundancies sweeping through the legal sectors since last few years ago. While those fears are still unfounded. AI technology is beginning to change the due diligence process.

Today, artificial intelligence. (AI) in due diligence process has become an integral part of the industry. Now it is time to separate its hype from reality and observe how top tier lawyers are employ AI-based tools for day-to-day processes. It can also be used to examine the challenges and benefits of using such software and have a look at the future of the due diligence process.

The adoption of AI for the legal industry has not eliminated the need for human insight. It helps law practitioners unleash tremendous potential by automating repetitive tasks and allowing them to spend more time on other higher-value tasks.

Due Diligence in the New Era

Machine learning, a sub-division of artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing to change the very nature of regulatory due diligence and the due diligence team’s capabilities. Advancements enable the teams to sort through vast information faster, relieve skilled labor, save time, cut costs, and improve due diligence quality and data coverage.

AI is full of potential to improve due diligence programs’ efficiency and effectiveness in the coming years. To better understand this potential, we also need to realize the limits of this technology.

Structuring Due Diligence Using AI

To understand the use of AI on due diligence, it’s helpful to review the general due diligence research process, which is split into two main phases:

1.       1. Information discovery

2.       2. Information synthesis

During information discovery, the researcher uncovers information using various sources, such as Google, litigation repositories, and corporate registries. They further qualify knowledge by determining how applicable it is for the subject and the relevance of AI to the due diligence. For instance, the researcher spends time to make sure the findings aren’t referring to another person with the same name as the due diligence subject to satisfy the first qualification. Simultaneously, suppose the information concerns the correct subject. In that case, the researcher determines whether the content is relevant to the purpose, typically determining if the information is relevant to a risk assessment or not.

Throughout this process, researchers even need to conduct information synthesis. During this process, the researcher sorts the information gathered during the discovery stage and makes sense. The researcher decides how the data fits into the case, makes connections between findings, and distills information that fits into the context. Essentially, the researcher compresses data in a more digestible form for the consumer in the research report. Information discovery is also an iterative cycle for synthesizing critical information; this may lead the researcher to think of new investigation angles, leading to a new iteration of information discovery.

Clustering of Results

A common and time-consuming obstacle that a due diligence researcher faces are determining what information is and is not attached to a proper interest subject. For instance, when specialists research an issue with a common name, it is time-consuming to match information with the correct individual without dealing with mistaken identity cases positively. Machine learning now uses a process called result clustering to automatically determine whether the information pertains to the subject of interest, resolving the subject’s identity, as more and more information, is parsed and linked to the actual issue.

Notably, the clustering process takes seconds, saving the researcher’s hours of sifting through results one by one. It also lower downs the likelihood of human error accompanying cognitive fatigue using limited search result previews to determine the applicability of the work to the subject of interest, which shows only a fraction of the product’s available information.

Learning to Rank

Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithms sort through results and re-rank them based on due diligence researchers’ factors after being trained on examples of products that researchers care about. For instance, in a hypothetical Company X, LTR algorithms may show the researcher X company’s court cases fir rather than having the subject’s most popular blog posts flooding the search pages. For this, AI can help to push research-relevant content on top of results. Using this, researchers can quickly review important information and avoid being weighed down by more consumer-focused content.

Result Classification

Several classification models can filter and organize relevant content by labeling training data and supervising learning techniques. Here the program learns from the activities of a human. These techniques train a model to uncover generalized patterns in textual examples labeled against one or more categories. A model rapidly parses through thousands of unseen examples and quantitatively predicts the results falling into different types after being introduced.

Result classification enables due diligence researchers to focus only and only on the results falling into the categories they’re most interested in. It feeds researchers’ results that stand out as ambiguous or can fall into overlapping categories. This way, researchers can disqualify highly irrelevant content and review works that remain ambiguous to the model.

Emerging AI capabilities can free up compliance and research experts through due diligence and high-level risk management activities. However, organizations still have dedicated due diligence teams and risk assessment strategies that drive effective risk management processes. To maximize AI’s benefits, it’s essential to understand what technology precisely fits your program and thereby choose the right provider.

Friday, 23 July 2021

Why is Technology Benchmarking Important for Your Business?

 Technology benchmarking incorporates measures of the performance of your business against your competitor in the same industry domain. Comparing the business from your competitors is crucial to improving your understanding of business potential and performance.

The technology benchmarking offers insight into how your business is performing, enabling you to discover what areas of improvement are required while developing a plan to accomplish those improvements.

Technology benchmarking is a tool for business that helps to identify the opportunities for improvements, like:

· Recognizing and prioritizing the main areas of opportunity.

· Understand the need of your customers better.

· Recognizing your weakness and strength.

· Setting up performance and goals expectations.

· Tracking the performance and changing the managing effectively.

· Understanding your competitor’s perspective to be more competitive.

Primary Classifications of Benchmarking

Certain kinds of benchmarking can be classified into three main categories — internal, strategic, and competitive.

1. Internal benchmarking is used when an organization already has established and proven best practices and basically needs to share them. Again, depending on the company's size, it may be large enough to address a broad range of performance (i.e., cycle time for opening new accounts in branches coast to coast). Internal benchmarking also may be necessary if comparable industries are not readily available.

2. Competitive benchmarking is used when a zx wants to evaluate its position within its industry. Moreover, competitive benchmarking is used when a company needs to recognize industry leadership performance targets.

3. Strategic benchmarking is used when identifying and analyzing world-class performance. This benchmarking is used most when a company needs to go outside of its industry.

Six steps to successful benchmarking

Use the following steps to practically benchmark your business against your competitors:

1. Competitive Landscape — Check what all similar technologies or solutions are present and the solutions under development through technology landscape or scouting services.

2. Identify Key Areas of Innovations and Development — From the technology landscape or scouting report, you can analyze the areas or technical fields with the most innovations and developments and areas for improvement. Identify effective techniques used by your competitors and areas in which their business is performing better.

3. Finalize Benchmarking Parameters — Benchmarking parameters should cover all the aspects of the scale of benchmarking such as intellectual property (IP) protection, key advancements or innovations, technical features, unique selling propositions, consumer or customer reviews, technical reviews from several secondary sources, number of citations over publications and technology scoring.

4. Allocating Weightage to Benchmarking Parameters — After finalizing benchmarking parameters, it is essential to weigh all the parameters according to the value they should be having in the total score or rank. Make sure you give required weightage to technical parameters, business parameters, and IP parameters to benchmark required solutions or technologies in a right way

5. Scoring and Evaluation — Scoring and evaluation involves some mathematical calculations and models depending upon the gathered information or required output which helps you to provide rank or score to each solution or technology

6. Planning and Taking Better Strategic Decisions — Benchmarking results can help you make better strategic decisions, be ahead of your competitors, know consumer demands and how the industry is addressing those, know the potential of competitors, and analyze the future competition.

Methods of Market Forecasting

 


Making a successful methodology for your marketing efforts doesn't occur at the same point, and neither is it an issue only the marketing department has to deal with. When you carry out the marketing strategy, the whole organization will have to manage with the consequences. A significant part of the marketing strategy is the forecasting process. Maybe the main conjecture is the sales forecast, which estimates how much will be sold by the organization in a given time frame. The rest of the organization should be ready to meet the needs of the sales forecast.

When it comes to preparing forecasts, of the most extreme significance is accuracy. Suppose you overestimate how much consumers will demand your product. In that case, you could end up spending an unreasonably high amount of money on such things as manufacturing and distribution, only to be unable to recover it when the actual sales start to stream in. When you overestimate demand, you might overextend yourself monetarily and find that your revenue is inadequate for paying your vendors, suppliers, and other business creditors. At times, you might need to lay off your employees.

Performing an underestimation of interest levels can also be shocking for your company. When you bring a new product into the market, you have to market it to create demand. If you are incapable of delivering just the right amount of product as demanded by the market, then your market share is at risk of being snatched away from you by your competitors. In case your competitors' products can match or exceed yours in quality, then you might be unable to restore your market share.

Different Market Forecasting Methods

A forecast is an estimate of what is probably going to occur. This sort of estimate, however, is neither arbitrary nor frivolous. It is the product of a complex process. You can make a forecast for many different processes, and most forecasts are arrived at by blending several of these processes.

 

  • Historic Trends/ Timeseries Model: We can always project the numbers based on historical data sets, and this forecast can be performed by analyzing the year-on-year growth trend. It can be extrapolated with three different scenarios based on the neutral forecast, lower confidence bound scenario, and upper confidence bound scenario.
  • Demand-Supply Analysis: We can also forecast the future market based on demand-supply analysis by mapping the current situation and the factors associated with it like technological and commercial development, price change, etc., for both supply and demand sides. 
  • Parent-peer Market Trend Analysis: This forecast can be performed by identifying the trends for parent and peer markets and understanding the similarities and differences between the respective trends. 
  • Correlation Analysis: It can be performed by looking at the relationship between variables, one which will be called a dependent variable (in the market forecast, that would be our target segment or title), another one is an independent variable, a factor that will cause a change to the dependent variable.
  • Model-Based Forecast: It is customized and combines various individual forecasting techniques such as Correlation Analysis, Historic trend/time series analysis, and factor analysis.
  • Probabilistic Approach: It is based on the probabilities of future scenarios. In this technique, we forecast the market in the 3-future system. 
    1. Pessimistic Scenario
    2. Optimistic Scenario
    3. Neutral Scenario
  • Visionary Forecast: It is non-scientific and is characterized by imagination and subjective guesswork. In this technique, experts' opinions, subjective insights, and judgment are used in forecasting.
  • Survey and Judgement Forecasting: This is based on the opinion and judgment of the various industry experts. This forecasting technique is used to study the unavailability of historical data or wholly new and unique market conditions.

An Ingenious e-Brain market forecast is based on a market model specific to the dynamics of a particular market segment. It recognizes the key influencing factors about which presumptions are made. These conjectures are informed by numerous fact bases, such as primary and secondary research, inquiry analysis, and extensive industry contacts. We aim to assist you in understanding a market's future spending patterns and provide quantified insight to support your business decision-making.

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

Freedom to Operate Search: Understanding FTO Search Analysis

 


Suppose- You have hit on a great idea, which has high potential. You started working on it with your product development team. You spent a lot of money on its R&D. As you are completely known of Intellectual Property, you can easily secure several features of your products after performing a patentability search. But, now as your product is ready to be launched in the market, but it results that there is an issue.  

Do you commit one big mistake in the procedure that could result in some unwanted litigation? Do you know what mistake you have made?

It turns out that you relied on a patentability search at the end and hire an intellectual property firm for conducting an FTO search just before the launch of a product. 

With FTO search, you come to know that your product cannot be launched in the market on which you spent thousands of dollars. Your product is infringing on various patents, which incorporates your competitors. But, canceling the commercialization of your product is not an option as you have spent a large amount of money on the development of the product and patent filing. 

Now, what can you do?

In this scenario, you have two options:

  • Filing an IPR for the patents with identical claims 
  • Purchase all the relevant patents 

Well, this option only works when you spend thousands of dollars, but still, there is not any certainty of thwarting litigation. 

This situation can be mitigated by getting an FTO search done in the started stage of product development. Performing FTO searches prior has many advantages too. It can help you avoid all the main barriers in the phase of development. And when you are ready to launch your product, you will have the freedom to operate. Following this valuable approach can help you reap great benefits. 

Let us now get to know in detail what FTO Search is…!

What is FTO (Freedom to Operate) Search?

The purpose of FTO or right to use search is to ascertain whether your planned product would infringe any patents or not. A Freedom To Operate Search might also incorporate the potential designs (possible product modification can mitigate the risk of patent infringement).

 The aim of the FTO search will be on patent claims and not the detailed descriptions or drawings. The main goal is to check If the product ignores any feature of each claim in the patents evaluated in the search. Not the same as validity or novelty search where the primary aim is on disclosure of prior art, the focus of FTO is mainly on the claims where time is needed to analyze. Due to this reason, an Freedom to Operate search costs more than the novelty search.

Why is it important to carry Freedom To Operate Search?

Below are several reasons to carry FTO search:

  • Reduces the risk of getting sued by others for infringing patent rights 
  • Assists in recognizing the patents which are expired and also identify technology that can be utilized from these expired patents 
  • Assists in recognizing the patents which are related to technology or product and build financial tactics such as the purchase of patents, licensing, patent invalidation. 

The Success of FTO Search

The success of the FTO search lies in three questions: What? Where? How?

‘What’ describes the boundaries of the search. This elucidates our understanding of the process or product in question. What is the product or procedure in question, and what kind of issue can it solve? What are the primary or non-primary subject features of the product or procedure? Are we required to limit the search with application areas? How roughly or closely are subject features explained? What are the related geographies? Do we need to look for some alternative features of a product for the evasion option?

‘Where’ explains the tools and strategies to analyze and search patents for a Freedom To Operate search where to explore and get relevant patents from? Do we need to incorporate several data sources and types? Which section of a patent should a searcher analyze? Where is the subject feature disclosed?

‘How’ explains the differences between the new searcher and an experienced searcher. How does a knowledgeable searcher checks a pile of patents to access relativity? How does the decision-making procedure work? How do you decide which one to keep and which one to refuse? 

All the above questions act as a tool for understanding the key terms relevant to the product exhaustively, mentioning scope, assembling several search concepts. 

Process Overview of Freedom to Operate 

  • Know the scope, therapeutic areas, subject matter, and particular market of technology
  • Create a search tactic for recognizing patents the invention might infringe. Recognize and make keywords to evaluate technology in the claims section of patent application applied to technology
  • Understand country-specific doctrines, statutes, and case laws for infringement
  • Search patent-related prior art
  • Check patents and review individual claims. Recognize technology and patents mainly to block the technology in question. Refuse results that are not related and keep a subset of patents with the claim, which presents an obstacle for entering the market 
  • Recognize the solutions for potential problems such as patent status, possible expiration, or analysis.
  • Create an FTO opinion as per the complete analysis and main findings
  • Display the results to inventors. Show potential IP issues and solutions.

Benefits of FTO Opinion?

An FTO opinion can be beneficial in mitigating the risk. For instance, FTO offers:

  • Assistance in protection against willful infringement charges by displaying an attempt at due diligence
  • Reduction of investigator or concern about the risk of infringement 

Hire Ingenious to Serve you Better 

If you are doing business safely, then thanks to the freedom to operate search. It needs to be noted that an FTO search can never offer a complete guarantee that you are not at infringement risk. The search, however, provides a great indication of where you stand. You will come to know how and where you can market your product perfectly as well as safely. This can prevent annoying squabbles and potentially high costs. 

With this blog, you must have been familiar with the concept of freedom to operate search. If you are looking for experts offering intellectual property services that can help with FTO searches for launching your product successfully, then Ingenious e-Brain is the right choice. Our experience reflects in the service we offer to our clients. 

Friday, 16 July 2021

Key Benefits of Supplier & Partner Identification for Any Business

A supplier is an entity or organization that provides goods or services for a specific period, ending when the transaction ends. Although, a partner is a tailored business relationship based on mutual trust, openness, and recognize risk and rewards that yield a competitive advantage.

Businesses often choose suppliers & partners primarily based on cost and are not reluctant to change if they see different products or services at a preferred price, location, features, etc. Although, it’s not in the company’s best concern as it leads to searching and arranging new agreements with the suppliers or partners, which results in additional costs.

In today’s exceptionally competitive global environment, procurement or vendor management plays a primary role in any business as it is significant for its success.

The following are some of the significant benefits associated with supplier & partner identification for the businesses:

 

  • Mitigating Risk: It reduces the risk of unforeseen cost implications, operations, or regulatory compliance for increased visibility. Identifying the suitable suppliers & partners for business means tracking the suppliers and appropriate information such as qualification, certification, past performance, and suppliers’ financials to acquire a broader picture of their risk level to protect your business.
  • Performance Optimization: The right supplier & partners related to your business can help to provide optimal performance by assuring that the company meets your needs and requirements. The data gathered while tracking suppliers’ performance can reveal many challenges that can be addressed before becoming problematic.
  • Cost Reduction: Having a secure relationship with the supplier due to sufficient procedures and processes, the company can decrease the overall cost by negotiating for better rates and having access to discounts and incentives, thus enhancing the overall profit margin of the business.
  • Ensuring Uninterrupted Supply: The presence of exemplary suppliers in your value chain is a must. The company must establish loyal relationships with them for the long term to ensure the business’s efficiency and smooth running.
  • Protects Brand Value: Identifying the right supplier & partner in your business will help save your company’s brand image. It holds much value as suppliers can help and provide their clients with relevant information on a supplier’s social and environmental standards, thus reducing the risk of a severe incident.

 

Our team offers our expertise in locating and evaluating potential suppliers and partners objectively regarding their IP, technology, pricing, and quality certifications. We conduct research to understand critical qualifying criteria for assessing potential suppliers and providing a list of ‘best fit’ recommendations based on the client’s requirements

Thursday, 15 July 2021

How Can White Space Analysis Help You In Finding Opportunities?

A white-space analysis is one of the essential methods for strategic innovation and usually follows initial patent landscaping. It consists of identifying a white space gap within a sector and considering how the gap could be filled. These analysis are done as a prerequisite to determining where a possible invention may be generated. They are also done by making a strategy that identifies a market that may be exploited. A comprehensive study of patents in your field or any others you may be involved in is a way to help you understand the future and recent trends and explore possible lucrative business opportunities.

This is the basis for many companies determining whether to research and develop a new invention. Before they can go through with pouring time, resources, and money into a new invention, they first require to know at an early stage whether they will benefit from their attempt or be sued by another company after they have initiated the product or technology.

White Space Analysis Process

The white space analysis process starts with searching for what has already been done and making extrapolations and creating ideas to find out what else can be done within a market. On the other hand, if you already have an idea in mind, you must scour literature, art, and the market to see if it has been done before progressing your idea into an invention.

Once you believe you have found a gap, you must perform a targeted search looking for patents in databases or other forms of relevant knowledge around the patent you’re planning to file. This is done to resolve if it is actually a white space or is already heavily occupied with similar patents. There are various processes for finding a white space (depending on what your intentions are).

Why Choose Ingenious e-Brain?

The white-space analysis allows you to see that few areas are more densely populated with patents than others by focusing on the broad map of intellectual property (IP). 

Ingenious e-Brain will help companies with existing R&D departments or companies planning at strategically filing IP for competition blocking, developing groundbreaking products and technologies, and actively enforcing IP properly conduct a white-space analysis. By executing an in-depth analysis, you will diversify your patent and your general IP portfolio while increasing a company’s valuation. It will better protect intangible assets and identify previously unknown intangible assets in a company.

Call us today and start getting the most out of your portfolio.

Wednesday, 14 July 2021

Opportunity Analysis for Generics: Everything You Need To Know

Patents are essential for inventors to protect their inventions, and they are also necessary for rivals to innovate and expand their products after their IP rights have expired. 

We have extensive experience studying intellectual property rights that are about to expire. We recognize that the expiring patent plays a critical role in the industry once the technology enters the public domain. For our customers, knowing that a patent is about to expire opens a world of possibilities. It will enable a business strategy to use the protected invention to introduce new products to the market. It may also be helpful if the client's patent is about to expire. 

The invention becomes part of the public domain after a patent has been in effect for 20 years for utility patents and 14 years for design and plant patents. It means that the invention is no longer protected by a patent and is no longer limited, allowing anyone to make, use, or sell it without fear of infringement. We perform a set of steps to find out the expiring patent that can be helpful to the client.

 

  1. Identification of patents using databases: In this step, the experts run a free search to find out the relevant patents for opportunity analysis of generics. Free and paid databases are used for the identification of patents. The patent search databases are Derwent Innovation, Patentscope, EPO, Drug bank, Chembank, Questel Orbit.
  2. Preparing key string: Our patent analyst carries out a key string search defined as querying a patent database using keywords to shape key strains. A key string consists of words related to the generic patents; synonyms related to the required patent.
  3. Refine search by Patent expiry Date: Our expert team refines the search using advance search, uses a date range provided by the client, and begins the search. This step filters out the patent according to its date of expiry.
  4. Manual analysis for screening patents: Our team conducts a manual analysis of the selected patent and is filtered out after advance search. 
  5. Verification of legal status: The team verifies the patents' legal status and filters out the expired, dead, or revoked patents. The legal status is checked using the orbit database, and further, the patents are filtered according to the status.
  6. Identification of commercial products: This is an optional step to identify the commercial products in generic that patents are near to expire. Details of such patents are extracted and filtered according to the client's needs.
  7. Listing all the commercialized products: We list out all the commercialized products that are appropriate according to the client's needs.
  8. Report generation: After filtering all the relevant patents according to the client's need, an excel report is generated containing all insights of a patent, including patent number, assignee, publication date, expiry date, the domain of inventions, and claims.

We offer generics opportunity research services to various pharmaceutical, biotechnology, cosmetics, and skincare companies. Our team closely examines patents that are about to expire to identify opportunities for our clients. Contact us now.

Friday, 9 July 2021

Competitor Intelligence Based on the Significant Parameters of Comparison

 


Competitive benchmarking is the technique of measuring your company against many competitors using a set collection of metrics. It is used to calculate the performance of a company and compare it to others over time.

It will often include looking at the practice behind these metrics as well. It means companies can define 'best practice' for specific metrics and compare this to their approach. It also is a crucial step of competitive analysis.

The benefits are clear.

Not only can you get a sorted summary of your company and how it performs on different levels, but it also encourages you to be competitive. Benchmarking means you can quickly identify when a competitor is doing well or beginning to struggle, which could help you evaluate your strategy.

 

Competitor benchmarking of companies can be done based on various business factors:

 

  1. Technology/Product Excellence: In this space of analysis, companies are studied based on their technological strength and the product strength and related aspects. There are various parameters which can we looked at to evaluate the company’s technology strength:
    • Breadth and depth analysis: Identification of variety or type of products offered by a company, which is indicated as breadth.  Then, the variant for each product will be identified, which is indicated as depth. The graphical plotting of all the variants lead to effective understanding of the company’s breadth and depth analysis.
    • Features and functionalities: The benchmarking of technologies' critical features from different companies' parameters will be identified, such as operating features, safety features, and additional features.
    • Product quality and reliability: this parameter is very critical one to analyse as there are several components to it. In quality mapping we could consider design, specifications efficiency, etc. Also, while mapping reliability we could consider several components like complaint handling, audit compliance, continuous improvement, etc. Since certain components are difficult analysis being their subjective nature, it becomes critical to do this analysis. We usually encourage it to be complemented with social media analytics to understand the customer perception.
    • Technology Innovation/trend/strategy: In this section we analyse the company’s innovations in recent past and try to gather the trend and strategic move by the company to lead and disrupt the operations. Mapping the innovations and technology strategies is a key aspect of this analysis. This is followed by analysing the company’s patents and identify the overlapping and distinctive technology focus among different payers.

 

  1. Business Excellence: In this space of analysis, companies are studied based on their business strategy excellence. This will help in understanding the company’s’ viability, scalability, and a dominance over the industry. There are various parameters which can we looked at to evaluate the company’s business excellence:

 

 

 

 

 

  • Geographic Footprint: This analysis will be carried out based on the reach of products across geographies, which will be identified by analysing the company's sales office distribution, regional brands, and distribution networks in different landscapes. The geographic footprint will be determined for each company's product by indicating local to global.
  • Distribution Channel: It will be analysed on two parameters, distribution channel level and distribution channel type. Distribution channel levels could be anything ranging from zero level to three level distribution which is identified based on the number of intermediaries involved.​On the other hand, the channel type could be exclusive, selective, and intensive based on how the company is engaging with the distribution.
  • Financial Capability: Based on the benchmarking of financial data of companies, parameters will be identified, such as total revenue, parent market share, R&D investment, and EBITDA.
  • Growth Strategy: Company’s growth strategy plays a key role in understanding the direction of company’s growth. There are several types of strategies. Majorly the analysis will be based on short term strategies and the generic strategies.

 

    • Generic Strategies: Generic growth strategies are usually classified in two major categories, viz. organic strategies, and inorganic strategies.
      • Organic strategies: Organic growth strategies are nothing, but the strategies adopted to seek the growth from within. In this, the companies are increasingly reply on the in-house capabilities and strength. The major organic growth strategies are product launch, product development, expansion, investments, etc.
      • Inorganic strategies: Inorganic growth strategies are the ones which arises from engaging with external forces and parties and utilising their capabilities to complement existing processes. Some of the key inorganic strategies are joint venture, merger and acquisition, collaboration, partnership, external contracts, and agreements, etc.
    • Short-term growth strategies: Strategies adopted by the companies to address the short-term agenda which could be business strategies, operating strategies and/or others. Major idea in this analysis is to identify the current focus of different companies by understanding their intent of such strategies which could be quick revenue generation, improved profitability, maintain cash flow, better customer engagement, etc.

 

  • Productivity and Cost-Efficiency: It will be analysed on three parameters: Productivity of the company, company efficiency, and selling cost of the product. 
  • Customer Value Creation - Based on various technologies' commercial and technological aspects from different companies' benchmarking, parameters will be identified. Parameters will be segregated into three criteria which are indicated as follows: ​
    • Identification: In this criterion, a parameter used to identify the criteria to purchase or adapt any technology will be covered. ​
    • Quantification: In this criterion, a parameter that is improvising operating conditions or features will be included. ​
    • Implementation: In this criterion, a parameter that will create additional value as the output of the technology will be covered. 

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