Using Patent Information for Identification of New Product Features with High Market Potential

AbstractThe current situation in planning and executing of innovation projects within industrial companies still contains considerable drawbacks such as the lack of the tools for systematic task definition for short to long term innovation or low reliability of market success prediction for new product concepts in the early stages of innovation process. Despite the best efforts to reduce risk of failures, the majority of all industrial innovation initiatives offers only incremental improvements compared to the products on the market. The attempts to incorporate customers into new product development require time-expensive customer interviews or extensive field research and seldom deliver significant competitive advantages. The paper discusses the possibilities of fast systematic identification of underserved customer needs, innovation tasks and new product features based on the internal competences of companies, on the analysis of the patent databases and the verification through market tests. The new approach focuses on identification and evaluation of customer needs, understood as solution-neutral benefits, which are expected by the customers. It proposes to enhance the function and contradiction analysis of technical systems and the analysis of the customer working process with the identification of customer benefits obtained from the patent databases. Similar customers’ working processes in various industrial sectors often have different levels of technical and technological evolution. This fact gives the opportunity to identify and to transfer customer needs known in one sector to another sector where these needs are still latent. Using patent information makes the customer needs transfer feasible and manageable