Predictive modeling can turn insight into actionable foresight. Using IP analytics to map technology into business scenarios is a powerful resource to outpace the competitive landscape, creating broader opportunities for ROI in a “blue ocean” mindset. Not the cinematic romance of industrial espionage, Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the “war room” where patent-search results and patent analysis are driven by the overarching business directives at hand to construct contextual scenarios for IP strategy – the “what if” situations, but with massive analytical information and knowledge processing in their sails to support them.

 

CI identifies risks and opportunities in the market before they become obvious, making a company more competitive relative to its entire business ecosystem including competitors, suppliers, technologies, customers, as well as macro-economic considerations.

 

There is a saying in the CI field that if the information is not actionable, then it isn’t intelligence. As a requisite, CI must be knowledge that can be leveraged, but such knowledge has a limited shelf life. If not acted upon timely, the valuable insight that one worked hard to acquire will become tomorrow’s front-page news.

 

Seena Sharp, author of Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World, describes one of the value-added benefits of CI as follows.

 

Because so few companies actually do CI, the ones that engage in CI disrupt the usual competitor activities and gain an immediate and powerful advantage for themselves. This is how you ‘un-level’ the playing field: by doing what competitors don’t recognize or expect and by being proactive.

 

In such a context, the CI processes of capturing relevant information, using a robust, comprehensive, and up-to-date knowledge base to predict outcomes, and acting on such valuable insight all have their associated “latencies.” In today’s aggressive IP arena, the cost of waiting to act can be fatal to an otherwise sound IP strategy.

 

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The FPIP CI Suite

 

The FPIP CI Suite offers a tiered range of eight different service engagements to precisely meet your CI needs. The benefits of being able to tap into such powerful resources in patent search and patent analysis without building up in-house capabilities are enormous. The tradeoff becomes one of economies of scale. If you don’t have pressing, ongoing CI needs, then the total cost to generate such insight in-house will be significantly greater to enlighten your IP strategy.

 

FlashPoint IP understands this issue, and provides premium, value-added IP engagements, as a way to avoid incurring such running expenses, for companies that would otherwise forego any CI initiative. Features of the eight FPIP CI Suite engagements are highlighted below. Please contact us for more details.

 

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♠ Impact-Factor Analysis – Business-case scenario construction & scorecard: client-driven engagement

 

The primary goal is to provoke thinking of decision makers who can then posture themselves by defining the impact factor of a scenario by asking some targeted open-ended questions:

 

• Can we survive the pessimistic scenario?
• Are we happy with the most-likely scenario?
• Are we ready to take advantage of the optimistic scenario?

 

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♠ Valuation-Implication Assessment – Focus-area benchmarking & trending: client-defined, brainstorming-driven engagement

 

The primary goal is to characterize a “perfect storm” of driving forces that will enhance shareholder value by:

 

• analyzing the linkages to the IP landscape of political, economic, market, industry, technology, and legal forces, and
• identifying the prevailing and future climate.

 

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♠ Due-Diligence Groundwork – Valuation definition & value-risk metrics: client-defined engagement

 

» Target-Firm Analysis

 

– Importance/value dimension

– Viability/market-potential dimension

– Reliability/risk dimension

 
 

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» Industry-Context Appraisal

 

– Assessing event-string meaning

– Blending the known & unknown

 

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» Assertion-Criteria Radar

 

– Where the technical, legal, and strategic intertwine

– Appropriability-regime alert

 

 
 

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♠ Cartography Discovery – Deep technology/firm/industry analysis & mapping: team-driven engagement

 

» Technology Scope/Reach Horizon

 

– Articulating a roadmap to your firm’s vision

– Facilitating an integrative, comprehensive, and

consistent enactment-strategy

 

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» Portfolio-Positioning Platform

 

– Landscape characterization of IP environment:

desert, island, jungle, forest, or thicket

 

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» High-Definition Industry Surveillance

 
– Exploring uncharted waters

– Exploiting the aligned IP gaps
 
 

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FlashPoint IP respects client confidentiality as detailed in our Statements of Work (SOW) for all CI engagements, covering all FPIP work products such as IP reports, patent search, patent analysis, maps, and visualizations. Contact us to discuss your options regarding IP strategy and positioning, and to learn more about how FPIP’s CI Suite can best advance your business interests.