IP Studies
IPStudies publishes independent professional research reports dedicated to the analysis of the technology and innovation assets of:
- private equity funded firms, for due diligence purpose;
- small and mid-caps quoted companies in particular in European markets, where there are no equivalent of the SEC filings for the investors to collect detailed technology development and intellectual property management information.
The IPStudies methodology is independent and solely investigates public, yet specialized, information such as scientific publications, published patent applications and prosecution data, as assigned or associated with the companies and their core inventors including their regular employees and trainees, but also the freelance ones such as designers and engineering consultants. When publicly available, licensing information is also taken into consideration. This data is confronted with publicly available information such as technical communication and documentation from the company and various online technology review resources, in order to more precisely qualify the technology, R&D and innovation positioning of the company in its competition landscape and evaluate its potential for further technology market development.
How does that work? In fact, patent applications have to be formalized as early as possible in the technology development lifecycle, before their public disclosure in any form, and they are published at the latest 18 months after their initial filing. So close surveillance of a firm patenting activity enables to anticipate strategic moves by the company towards the mid or long term horizon, depending on its technology development cycles and IP management processes, at a much finer grain than fundamental financial analysis.
This closer scrutiny to intangible technology assets is particularly relevant for value investment in technology firms: financial analysis can give a clue of how much has been invested in R&D, because that is what is captured in accounting, but it does not tell what this R&D is actually about. What if Apple had focused its R&D investment into endless improvements of its OS, fighting for more market shares against Microsoft, instead of inventing and designing the iPod, conquering more market shares from the CE giants?
Moreover, the available information is not only of technical nature or limited to early innovation detection, even in the case of patents; for instance it is also possible to derive some geographical investment/de-investment choices by a firm from the international patent prosecution and maintenance files along the 20 years lifetime of the invented technology protection, as well as the attention paid by its competitors to the technology by looking for patent opposition and re-examination procedures. The latter also require significant investment so they constitute a good (and public although a bit hidden) indicator of underlying strategic battles.
More details on the IPstudies methodology backgrounder and practical applications of patent analytics for IP managers, marketing and strategic planning professionals and value investment analysts, can be found in our 2011 Patent Analytics Applications report (Rapport original: Analyse d’indicateurs brevets: fondements et applications).
Interested? For more information on available IPStudies reports please contact us at:
+41 79 787 57 46
