It seems simple enough to wonder how various forms of business intelligence can help a company.  However, to answer this question takes discipline.  What is a smart business decision?  For me it is a fast, high-quality, sticky decision that enhances a sustained advantaged business position for an organization. 

 

The next question is often “what is required of an organization to make such a decision?”  Typically information and knowledge management experts find that first and foremost requirement isrobust, valid data.  Patent information (because of the time and energy required of the inventors, their organizations, patent offices, and court reviews) is such an audited information source.  The second requirement is that the raw data must be converted into information.  For example, “datedata” has to be transformed into years of exclusive business use,“inventor data” has to be transformed into size of R&D investment, etc.  Finally, this information has to be transformed into business wisdom.  This requires placing the information into a business context via competitor comparisons, industry benchmarking, and scenario planning.  Once this transformation of robust data into business wisdom is done, an organization’s leadership can assess it by the relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats present.  It is thoughtful consideration of the relative timing and magnitude of these four factors that make a business decision “smart”.

 

Because many business executives think only of their own and competitors patents, they often think of IP intelligenceas  being useful for older, more mature medium and large size companies.  Although this is true, it leaves out a very important use of IP based information.  In Silicon Valley where I work, small start-up companies who do not yet have a patent, still make good use of IP intelligence.  They study the technology and entities investigating it, organize their findings into opportunity and threat categories, then share this wisdom with potential investors to secure larger and more rapid funding for their businesses.  Thus, the “right” time for any entity to be using IP intelligence to make smart R&D decisions is “now”.

 

In addition to executives improperly thinking IP intelligence is only for larger companies, another misconception is that IP intelligence requires a lot of time and money to obtain.   This is because when many people think of patents, they think of large expensive lawsuits.  In fact, the best way to use IP intelligence is to focus on making everyday business decisions.  Key attributes of such everyday decisions are that they be Just-In-Time, Just-Good-Enough, and Focused-on-Business-Outcomes (not outputs).   Patent professionals have complicated business leaders understanding of these attributes because often they are trained professionally to do a “perfect” job of searching patent information and sharing it with executives.  Such is at times an unnecessary and unproductive use of time and business resources.  Instead, putting patent data into visual graphic displays can be done easily with current software.  The “trick” is to know which display is needed to make each different type of business decision.  In the future, training of IP intelligence professionals on this aspect of their profession will become a more important part of their curriculum.  Using the proper patent-based pictures and displays allows executive teams to “see” what competition is doing.  They can then appropriately select R&D projects to invest in that are resourced with the right number and type of individuals to ensure probable completion and acquisition of IP rights ahead of their competition.  They can also avoid suicide projects that have little chance of success, given the already strong R&D and IP leadership of another entity.  Finally, when R&D and executive leadership audits project progress toward commercialization, they can dynamically trade-off timing of personnel and capital expenditure resources to meet the needs of current shareholders and future equity performance.

 

In summary, leveraging IP intelligence absolutely helps a company.  It does so at the beginning of a company’s R&D lifecycle, at each development stage, then continuously thereafter depending on how fast the technology and business environment changes.  IP based intelligence can be used to find new market areas to exploit andfind new technologies to create or change the industry’s Dominant Design.  IP intelligence can also be used to determine how many patents are really needed by a company (as spending too much on patents can hurt a company almost as much as spending too little). Finally, using IP intelligence ensures value-adding merger, acquisition and licensing transactions.  In short, IP intelligence needs to be a basic part of every company’s best-practice business decision making.