Patent research as a basis for strategic decision making in innovative activity

The problem of the application of intellectual property benchmarking in innovative activity of any company was considered in the article. Maintaining a company’s competitiveness in the market requires building an effective strategic system for managing the innovative process. That allows developing and marketing the production that meets the customer’s needs, providing the required technical and economic parameters of the equipment and leading the competition. Studying the level of technology and the best world practices is an important stage of the innovative process. Patent research is an instrument for obtaining strategic information about the competitors’ achievements and market trends. Deep search and comprehensive analysis of patents allow determining the trends in the product and technology development, consumer demands as well as technical and economic characteristics of competitors’ products. Additionally, patent research allows to determine the competitors’ R&D topics and strategic technological areas, to draw conclusions about the perspectives of the developments. Legality, low price and availability of such type of information are what makes patent information a unique and underappreciated tool in the innovative process. The authors establish the required terms and define in details the goal, the objectives, the participants of patent research; show the governing regulations, present the well-known methodological approaches. Some graphical methods for analyzing the trends in the development of a technological object were examined separately, with recommendations given on the choice of parameters for searching and processing the obtained data sets.