Whitespace analysis: A smart step towards research, innovation and securing patent rights
How to find whitespaces
Recently during a client discussion about White space analysis where it was pointed that in his technology domain, not many companies file for the patents. Therefore, it is inaccurate to find whitespaces just by analyzing patent data set.
So, the question was, what could be the smart way to find whitespaces in such cases.
Before jumping straight to the answer, let’s look at what the whitespace analysis actually is and how is it important for any company or organization to capture the market ahead of their competitors.
Whitespace analysis helps to identify overcrowded and sparse areas in a technology domain. It helps in identifying new opportunities for innovation in less competitive areas.
How to go about the whitespace analysis
For any whitespace analysis, a scope is defined in terms of what is expected from the whitespace analysis. For e.g. whitespaces can be identified in terms of
Technology,
Applications,
Material, etc.
Similarly, many other parameters can be selected. After the scope is defined, relevant patents are identified using combination of keywords and classes. All the patents are analyzed then according to parameters defined. Patent classification is done according to different methods. Generally, after the classification is done, the areas with a smaller number of patent filings are considered as whitespaces.
But this approach may not give a full-proof idea about the whitespaces due to many reasons
- It is not necessary that company files for patent in a particular technology domain
- It may happen that technology is old enough and therefore the patents could not be captured into the dataset due to date restriction.
Therefore, a 360-degree analysis is needed to shortlist the whitespaces. Apart from the patents, it is important to look into the Non-patent literature which includes both the research papers and products available in the market for the related technology domain.
To answer the client’s question, we suggested that Whitespaces can’t be decided on the basis of the number of filed patents only. The inclusion of other literature is also necessary such as existing products, research work, etc. in the technology domain.
