Locating the key competitors: A new tool for technology manager

We propose to use the product of a competitor's h-index and a weighted sum of the citations of its h-core patents as a Core Value characterizing the competitor's h-core performance in terms of both quality and quantity. The key competitors are those of the greatest Core Values. The approach is applied to empirical data and compared with similar measures such as the products of the h-index and other h-type indices. The approach obviates the insensitivity problem to exceptionally highly cited patents and does not impose significant analytical overhead to the technology manager.