تجزیه و تحلیل سبد سرمایه گذاری ثبت اختراع به عنوان یک ابزار مفید برای شناسایی تحقیق و توسعه و فرصت های کسب و کار نرم افزار تجربی در تغذیه و صنعت بهداشت

Computer aided patent portfolio analysis is a useful tool to evaluate both the R&D landscape and business opportunities. All necessary patent data can be generated from publicly accessible data bases. Patent data allow conclusions about a firm’s patent activity and the quality of its patent portfolio. Further, the international and technological scope of a company’s patent strategy can be assessed. This information is particularly interesting for the evaluation of a firm’s innovative potential. Besides, it allows conclusions to be drawn on the innovative dynamics of the considered market segment, in this case dietary supplements. The results are shown in graphs and spider charts. In sum, we can make conclusions about the relative innovative power and patent strength of a company within the selected market segment. We draw conclusions on the importance of patents as a method of knowledge protection in this market and gather insights about the availability of companies that are potentially suitable for co-operations or acquisitions.

The reader is invited to imagine a company that intends to act in an area of business that is new to the firm. Naturally, such an intention involves a great number of risks that need to be minimised as far as possible in the preliminary stages. A thorough analysis of the operating environment and the company’s own possibilities are indispensable and thus need to be mentioned first and foremost. Will the market segment prove to be profitable in the long run? Can the company’s own established products or the ones that are already in the R&D pipeline satisfy the requirements of the market, or is it necessary to develop new products or to include them into the company’s portfolio by licenses or co-operations? Much market data may be collected by the company itself or, alternatively, be purchased from respective commercial suppliers, or the company may commission the data collection. In many cases it will be reasonable to involve external expertise either by consultancy contracts or simply by poaching suitable experts. However, this way a number of questions will remain unanswered. For example, these include an estimate of which course R&D may have to take in the considered market segment, how the evolution of potential competitors and customers may unfold, and what partners may be considered for reasonable acquisitions or co-operations. It is a fact that a large part of this information is available for free and virtually waiting to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. We are talking about patent information that can be retrieved via databases. The aim of this paper is to show on the basis of a concrete example, how the systematic selection and evaluation of patent information may contribute to the assessment of new business opportunities. This paper is a subsequent practical application of a general framework developed to use patent information for strategic business planning [1].

The analysis of the patent situation shows that the market segment of Dietary Supplements and the appending individual fields of technology have visibly increased their dynamics particularly in the past years, which speaks for a high technical and economic importance. The patent landscape is highly fragmented, but two companies of particular significance can be identified: Nestlé dominates the whole segment because their portfolio shows the highest patent strength; this position results from the circumstance that the company—with a decreasing tendency—shows the highest patent activity in combination with a patent quality above-average and a high degree of internationality. The other company are Abbot Laboratories, that only take a medium rank regarding patent activity, but whose protective rights show the by far highest quality and citation frequency. In practice this means that a supplier of Dietary Supplements or their components would basically need to take into account the protective rights of these two companies. A further interesting finding is that among the Top 10 companies in this segment there are only companies who deliver directly to the end user, i.e., there are no producers of raw materials. Hence this market segment—if it is at all possible to evaluate it due to its strong fragmentation—is predominantly “application-driven”. Another interesting result is that three Russian research institutes together have made more than twice as many applications as the top company Nestlé just in the past four years. The quality of these protective rights, however, is below average because they refer to Russia alone. On the other hand this means that there may be accumulated a large potential of know-how which might make the three institutes interesting co-operation partners whose patents would deserve closer examination.