Formulating the right R&D strategy is crucial for building a successful business. In order to devise such strategies, researchers or developers within a company’s R&D department must have extensive knowledge of the trends and landscape of a technology domain. Furthermore, they must be certain about the direction they plan to pursue before spending their valuable time and money on any step. Patent landscape analysis is a tool that can help researchers in making such crucial decisions. It enables them to understand various trends, innovations, gaps in the market, and competitors’ activities in any technology domain.

Read the following article that discusses how Sagacious IP’s patent landscape search service helped Southeast Asia’s largest material company in devising their next R&D steps.

Brief Description of the Problem

Our client is a Thailand-based material company with a diverse product portfolio that includes polymers, paper, cement, building and construction materials. They were in the process of devising an R&D strategy in the field of polyvinyl copolymers. Hence, they approached Sagacious IP for a custom project wherein they wanted our team to understand and analyze the patent landscape of the polyvinyl copolymers domain. They also sought our help in identifying the white spaces, existing problems, their solutions as well as strategies of their competitors.

Solution Offered by Sagacious IP

In the initial stages, the client was unsure of the scope of search required to provide answers to both the technical and business stakeholders within the company. Sagacious IP understood their requirements and prepared a detailed proposal consisting of multiple search strategies to capture the potential pool of patent documents to be analyzed. Our team also provided the client with multiple options with varying search scope to help them to customize the search as per their requirement. After some iterations, the team was able to finalize the scope to capture all patent references relating to “Medical applications of polyvinyl chloride polymers” filed in the past 10 years.

At first, the team studied the patent dataset to screen out relevant references and key patents in the domain, while also preparing a detailed taxonomy for bucketing the relevant references. Thereafter, they performed an in-depth analysis for identifying various problems in the prior-art on chemical properties of polyvinyl chloride polymers and solutions to these problems provided within the patent references. The team also carried out a white space analysis to identify hotspots for innovation and unexplored areas for improving the chemical properties. Besides the two studies, we also identified the top players in the domain, their patent filing trends, details of technologies, and problems that have been solved to understand their R&D direction.

The Impact

At the end of the project, Sagacious IP provided a comprehensive report illustrating the entire analysis in the form of graphs and charts. These graphs and charts demonstrated global trends, key players, white spaces, problems, and solutions in the domain. Our team comprising of one project manager, one senior analyst, and one junior analyst worked closely with the client for two months to answer their technical questions and relay the necessary information. In essence, we provided the client a holistic overview of the polyvinyl copolymers domain to enable them to make informed decisions regarding their next R&D steps and direction.

Conclusion

A patent landscape analysis offers powerful insights into any technology domain. The scope of such a landscape can be tailored to provide solutions for business challenges such as deciding the R&D direction of a company or understanding competitor strategy. Sagacious IP’s Patent Landscape Search service enables clients to understand the evolution of an industry or technology by providing an overview and analysis of patent data. This in turn allows them to make important business decisions. To know more about the patent landscape search service, click here.

-Harsha Agarwal (Life Sciences) and the Editorial Team

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