Monitoring Competitors’ Innovation Activities: Analyzing the Competitive Patent Landscape Based on Semantic Anchor Points

Monitoring the movements of competitors as well as their innovative endeavors and the targets of their efforts is an important task for the business intelligence of a company. In addition to market-oriented means, such as observing competitors' publications and websites, or analyzing existing products, patent analysis may offer future-oriented insights. Usually, analysts in companies search for competitors' patents and analyze them manually, producing qualitative information for the abovementioned task. Apart from this qualitative information, quantitative information might help to measure, visualize, and communicate what competitors are really doing. For this purpose, we develop a method based on semantic anchor points aiming at analyzing the competitive landscape to achieve insights as to how the innovation activities of one company are reflected in the core competencies of another company over time. As novel contributions, we adapt the forming of anchor points for the case of companies and develop several quantitative analysis types, e.g., regarding basic competitor landscaping and high risk analysis. We explain the four steps of our approach and demonstrate its use in monitoring direct competitors in the technology field of gearing, which is part of the automotive industry. Our method can be transferred to other industries due to specific suppositions. It is able to form the core of an automated monitoring system.