Monitoring the movements of competitors as well as their innovative endeavors and the targets of their efforts is an important task for the business intelligence of a company. The IPMI successfully published the paper Monitoring Competitors’ Innovation Activities: Analyzing the Competitive Patent Landscape Based on Semantic Anchor Points in the journal IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

For this purpose of monitoring the movements of competitors, the authors develop a method based on semantic anchor points aiming at analyzing the competitive landscape to achieve insights as to how the innovation activities of one company are reflected in the core competencies of another company over time. As novel contributions, the authors adapt the forming of anchor points for the case of companies and develop several quantitative analysis types, e.g., regarding basic competitor landscaping and high risk analysis. The authors explain the four steps of their approach and demonstrate its use in monitoring direct competitors in the technology field of gearing, which is part of the automotive industry. The method can be transferred to other industries due to specific suppositions. It is able to form the core of an automated monitoring system.

Kronemeyer, L.L., Eilers, K., Wustmans, M., and Moehrle, M.G. (2020) Monitoring Competitors’ Innovation Activities: Analyzing the Competitive Patent Landscape Based on Semantic Anchor Points. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 1–16. doi: 10.1109/TEM.2019.2958518. link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8952616