How to Track Competitors in Discovery

• How to track the entirety of a competitor's activity
1. Set up a company search for your competitor
2. Go to the company profile page of your competitor
3. Have a look at the Data Snapshot to find key numbers regarding your competitor
4. Investigate each of the data types further
5. Consider subsidiaries by using the corporate tree
6. Set up an alert to be kept aware of updates for your competitor
• How to track a competitor's activity within a specific technology area
1. Use Field Search to build out a company+technology search 
2. Look at the results for your competitor in this technology area
3. Drill into the data for each organization

 

In this article, we will go through the workflows that you would want to utilize to be able to track your competitors using the Discovery platform. Being able to effectively track your competitors is critical, as it enables you to be able to see the exact technologies that they are trying to develop and then make your own plans based on this information.

There are two main ways to track your competitors using Discovery. This is to either track that company's complete activity or just within specific technology areas that you both operate within. Here are the steps you would want to make use of within Discovery to be able to cover both of these scenarios:

 

Scenario 1: How to track the entirety of a competitor's activity

 

Set up a company search for your competitor

The first step you would want to perform is to just execute a basic company search for this competitor. We would recommend for you to click on the top suggested company in most cases.

 

 

Go to the company profile page of your competitor

Once you reach the search results page, you will want to click on your competitor to reach their company profile page.

 

 

Have a look at the Data Snapshot to find key numbers regarding your competitor

If you scroll down this tab, you will come to the "Data Snapshot", which provides you with some key numbers relating to the amount of data we have for this company. You will then want to click into the data type of interest to find more information about this company's recent activity.

 

 

Investigate each of the data types further

Once you click into the different tabs for each of the data types, you can view the corresponding results.

 

 

Consider subsidiaries by using the corporate tree

When you are looking into this company, it's important to look at their subsidiaries as well as they may be working in very specific technology areas. You can do this by viewing your competitor's corporate tree.

 

 

 

Set up an alert to be kept aware of updates for your competitor

You can also setup an alert for this company which will make you aware of any updates relating to this company for your data types of interest.

 

 

Scenario 2: How to track a competitor's activity within a specific technology area

 

Use Field Search to build out a company+technology search 

Once you have done this, you will want to build out a combined company and technology search, so you can restrict the search for your competitor just down to the technology area of interest. You will want to use variations in the naming of your technology area, to make sure you don't miss articles where different terminology has been used. You will also want to use topics rather than free text in general, as they are more exact and will make sure the data you get is relevant to this technology space.

 

 

Look at the results for your competitor in this technology area

Once you reach the search results page, you will see a list of the top companies that relate to the search you performed. The specific competitor you focused on should always appear at the top of the list, however, you can also see other potential competitors within this technology area.

Below each company, you can see how many patents and news relate to your search..

 

 

 

Drill into the data for each organization

You can then drill into the result sets for each of the different organizations. If you are getting too many results to comfortably deal with, make sure to utilize the filters on the left-hand side of the page to refine your results down further. This could be for example by date or by topic area.

 

 

You can again also setup an alert for the different data types based on your search.