Breaking The Information Barrier
There is a continuous question in analysis: Do you have enough of the right information to make a smart decision? Without the right information, there can be blind spots, gaps, or incomplete answers. Too often people have access to the right information, but do not incorporate it because it is too difficult to consolidate and bring it all together. It is largely a matter of simplicity — how easy is it to get the right information? Think of your own job; you know your company has knowledge about licensing deals, litigation, etc, but how often do you include it for competitive intelligence?
There is a significant barrier today in which a vast amount of internal knowledge about a subject exists, but it is nearly impossible to incorporate that with external analytics.
It’s almost universally the case, for example, that research teams and companies develop their own taxonomies of patent management, and they usually view these patents in the context of the market. For instance, a consumer packaged goods company might develop a patent taxonomy such as the following: an oral hygiene patents group containing a toothpaste patents group, which in turn contains a group of tooth-whitening patents. (e.g. Oral Hygiene/Toothpaste/Tooth-Whitening).
This taxonomy is often constructed by internal annotations that have no meaning to public sources (such as the patent office), which has its own taxonomy of patent classifications. The researcher must cope with two views of the same set of IP data. Compound that with other annotations such as licensing deals on patents, patent infringement threats and most prolific inventors, and you have a lot of internal data to manage — in addition to externally available information.






