Idea Prioritization: Using Metrics to Determine What Comes Next

Moving ideas through the innovation lifecycle, from conception and evaluation to protection and monetization, is both expensive and time-consuming. It’s not feasible to bring every idea your R&D team has—even every pretty good idea they come up with—to market. Some innovations are simply more likely to deliver a return on the large investment required to polish and protect them. (On average, one patent is filed per $1 million in R&D.) With stakes this high, how do you decide which technologies are advanced from original concept to protected IP?

Your next “big thing” depends on how the technology landscape is changing, what your competitors are doing, and where white spaces exist in or near your industry. You also need to answer questions about the longevity of your current patents, as well as what’s in the R&D pipeline. Of course, these questions and your answers directly relate to your organization’s IP strategy, as well as overall business goals.

It’s possible to complete competitive and landscape analysis manually. However, it’s also expensive and time-consuming. (The average cost of a freedom to operate search is approximately $10,000 in 2022.) Landscapes are shifting every day; almost 3.3 million patent applications were filed around the world in 2020. With innovation moving quickly—especially in fast-moving fields like telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare—failing to advance promising ideas quickly can leave room for your competitors to realize first-to-market advantages.

The leadership team’s instincts or “gut feelings” are no longer enough to decide what comes next. You need AI-backed solutions that evaluate technology and deliver actionable metrics that allow you to confidently prioritize ideas. Augmenting human decision making with artificial intelligence mitigates biases while eliminating assumptions and groupthink.

Evaluate Ideas and Prioritize Technologies

IP.com’s Technology Vitatility Report quickly and effectively identifies ideas with potential, evaluating an invention disclosure for novelty and commercial potential using statistical modeling, data mining, and machine learning. While doing so, the report also identifies semantically similar patents and highly relevant keywords and concepts. The result is actionable scores of invention and competitive novelty, ranging from 0 to 1,000, that clearly indicate how unique an idea is.

For evaluations further into the innovation lifecycle, there’s the Patent Vitality Report (PVR). This report identifies high-risk investments and low-quality IP, as well as relevant licensing partners and industry trends, for informed litigation and renewal decisions. The PVR scores patents on litigation risk, monetization potential, new technology value, and patent quality. The overall strength of a patent is represented by a score ranging from 0 to 1,000 based on 14 proprietary Patent Factor Indexes.