White Space
Do you know every company faces a challenge on how to differentiate their business from their competitors using existing products and innovations and transforming them to meet unmet customer needs, create a barrier to entry, or increase the ROI?
Overview
White space analysis is a process that helps to identify overlooked or underutilized, less crowded technologies or their applications in a particular domain. It helps in the creation of new innovations or finds new usage for the existing innovations, leading to higher revenues or ROIs. An effective white space analysis paves a path to a company’s growth and its firm establishment.
Need
White Space Analysis is used as a strategy by companies of all sizes to
meet the following objectives –
- Internal Focus – Companies can do this to identify technology areas as part of growth strategy as well as to reach a consensus amongst various stakeholders on future R & D plans
- External Focus – Companies try to understand unmet market needs and how efficiently concurrent ideas and innovations can be transformed to address the gaps in market needs and increase upselling and cross-selling opportunities
- Future Focus – Here the focus is on the creation of new IPs, fortification of own patent portfolios in areas that have a high potential of achieving exclusivity in the future, and then innovating and filing patents in those areas. This is also needed to assist in strategic planning and business decision-making by identifying future technology waves at an early stage.
Methodology
Researchwire has a proven methodology for any whitespace analysis where we follow a four-step method for white space analysis –
Define
A scope is defined in terms of what is expected from the whitespace analysis. For e.g., whitespaces can be defined in terms of-
- Technology
- Applications
- Processes
- Materials
- IP etc.
Analyse
A 360- degree analysis is done to identify the white spaces where we look into patents, NPLs as well as products and their specifications as available in the market for related technology domain to identify -
- Technologies less explored
- Market/Geographical Areas where the technology has not reached yet
- Fastest growing industries which can utilize the given technology/product
- Industries where potential ROI is attractive i.e., industry can lower overall costs by using given technology
Validate
We must validate all the identified white spaces to ensure that recommended whitespace is feasible and makes business sense as the stakes on of working on whitespace which in the end is not viable or feasible is quite large. The validation process helps in identifying the actual whitespace for research, innovation, and manufacturing of unique products.
- Usefulness of whitespace technology : Identified by reviewing related patents and Non-patent literature(NPL)
- Technical feasibility & efficiency yield over other technologies
- Anyone in the industry operating in the identified whitespace technology domain
- Market need for the identified whitespace technology domain through different surveys reflecting the voice of the customer
Report
Reporting is a crucial part of white space analysis to ensure that the message is properly conveyed and our recommendations are clear. This is achieved using -
- Creation of IP and technology maps to show crowded/sparse areas
- Representing geographical density maps to indicate activities
- Identification of technical challenges to solve or to improve
- Feasibility analysis for the identified whitespaces by looking into the scientific literature for techno-economic evaluations
