Reading competitors through their patent filings

What each signal means

Where they file shows which markets they intend to defend. A single Indian filing is an experiment; a PCT taken into eight national phases is a strategy.

What they let lapse is often more informative than what they file. Abandoned national phases and unpaid renewals mark retreats.

What they claim shows the technical direction they committed to at a point eighteen months before you can see it - because applications publish at eighteen months.

Who is named as inventor shows where their capability sits, and movement of those names shows where it is going.

Turning it into action

Two actions, not one. Avoidance: if a granted right sits across your roadmap, that is a design decision, and it is cheap early.

And intervention: publication opens the pre-grant opposition window, which any person may use. Since March 2024 there is a fee, e-filing is mandatory, and the Controller applies a prima facie filter first - so a well-evidenced representation against an over-broad claim is both cheaper and more likely to be entertained than a scattergun one.

Set up Journal monitoring on your technical classifications and named competitors. It costs very little and most organisations never do it.

What to actually do

• Watch lapses as closely as filings.
• Read claims, not titles and abstracts.
• Monitor the Journal by classification and by competitor name.
• Feed findings into the roadmap, not only into the legal file.