Identifying new business opportunities from competitor intelligence: An integrated use of patent and trademark databases

- This study suggests an approach to identify business opportunities from competitor intelligence.
- Patent data was used to examine a firm's technological capability and similarity with competitors.
- Trademark data was used to investigate a firm's target gods and services.
- Collaborative filtering, association mining and text mining were used as main methods.
- Business opportunities were identified from market penetration and expansion perspectives.

This study aims to analyze the position of technology-centered companies in complex market dynamics and discover new business opportunities from competitor intelligence. For this, we consider both technology and market characteristics in providing competitor intelligence by utilizing patent data as a representative proxy for a firm's technology, and trademark data as an information source for the firm's target goods and services. To analyze the two types of data, a collaborative filtering approach together with portfolio analyses and association mining techniques were adopted. Theoretically, this is one of the earliest attempts to combine patent data and trademark data to investigate corporate strategies. In practice, the research results are expected to be used as a decision criterion to diagnose the economic value that companies can obtain by entering the market, as well as the technological value to be passed onto their customers. Thus, the proposed approach can be useful to support effective technology and business strategies in a firm.