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TL;DR
- Technical competitive intelligence answers three questions: what are competitors developing, who is new, and are we already too late?
- Patents are the most structured source, but counting them shows where money goes, not what will win.
- The car industry out-filed batteries with hydrogen for 25 years. Batteries out-improved hydrogen in every reading. Copying the filings meant copying the mistake.
- Read competitors' patents for direction and rate, not for volume.
The three questions R&D teams ask about competitors
Competitor questions came up in almost every R&D account GetFocus worked with. They fall into three groups.
1. What are they doing? Competitors, but also suppliers, partners and universities: how is the whole field moving?
2. Who is new? For many teams the bigger worry is not the known rival but the new entrant nobody is tracking yet.
3. Are we already too late? Has a competitor already found the answer we are still looking for?
Most competitive intelligence answers the first. The third is the one that decides the budget.
How to gather competitive intelligence on R&D: five sources
| Source | What it shows | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Patent filings | Where competitors invest, who they work with, how focus shifts | Published about 18 months after filing |
| Publications and conference talks | Early research directions | Hard to link to commercial intent |
| Hiring and job posts | Capabilities being built | Noisy and indirect |
| Product launches and specs | What reached the market | Arrives after the bet was made |
| Customers and suppliers | What is being asked for and tested | Anecdotal, hard to scale |
Patents are the most structured and complete of these: almost every technical advance is patented, in a standardised, citation-linked record. That is why technical competitive intelligence starts there. The question is how you read them.
Counting patents tells you what competitors believe
Backtest · Automotive powertrains · 2001–2026
Copy your competitors' filings and you copy their mistake
Hydrogen out-filed batteries for 25 years. Batteries out-improved hydrogen in every reading.
What the industry filed · new patent families per year
What the rate read · improvement rate per year
Computed from patents public at each date · GetFocus backtest: hydrogen vs batteries vs ICE
In 2008 the automotive industry filed 2,896 new hydrogen fuel-cell patent families, more than for the combustion engine itself. Toyota launched the Mirai in 2014 and released 5,680 fuel-cell patents royalty-free. By filing volume, the consensus was clear and the competitive response obvious: match it.
The GetFocus mobility backtest reads the same patents a different way. In 2001 NMC batteries measured an improvement rate of 54.2% a year against hydrogen's 21.4%. Batteries led in every reading for the next two decades. The industry sank $20 billion and more into the losing powertrain. Hydrogen still out-files batteries today, 2,841 families a year against 504. It no longer matters.
Filing volume measures what competitors believe. The rate measures what is working.
From "what are they doing?" to "are they right?"
Most teams stop at what competitors are doing. The half they skip is whether competitors are doing the right thing. That changes the playbook:
- Map competitors by technology route, not by company. Which routes does each one fund?
- Put a rate on every route. GetFocus estimates a Technology Improvement Rate per route from the patent citation network.
- Read the gap. A competitor betting heavily on a slow route is not ahead. Following them is the risky move.
- Watch for new entrants on fast routes. Filings by unfamiliar names in a fast-improving route are the earliest sign of a challenger coming up from behind.
Read this way, the patent record answers "are we too late?" A competitor filing less, in a route improving faster, can be further ahead than one filing more in a mature route. The VW–Bosch case shows it: the year they committed $1.71B to a classical modular driving stack, a rival architecture was already improving 2.6× faster.
What patents don't show
- Trade secrets. Some process know-how is never published.
- The last 18 months. Patents publish after filing, so the newest work is invisible for a while.
- Software and data. Often protected by contract or secrecy rather than patents.
None of this breaks the method. The rate is computed from the citation network across thousands of families, so it reads the direction of a whole route, not the completeness of one company's portfolio.
FAQ
What is competitive intelligence in R&D?
The collection and analysis of information about competitors' research and development: what they work on, with whom, how fast and in which direction, so your own R&D bets account for theirs.
How do you gather competitive intelligence legally?
From public sources: patents, publications, conference talks, job postings, regulatory filings, product documentation and trade press, plus normal conversations with customers and suppliers.
How can you tell if a competitor is ahead technically?
Compare the improvement rate of the route they back, not the number of patents they file. A competitor filing less in a faster-improving route can be further ahead than one filing more in a mature route.
How often should competitor monitoring be updated?
Continuously, with alerts only when something changes. GetFocus recomputes every route's rate monthly as new patents publish and fires an alert when a threshold you set is crossed.
