NPL holds a lot of potential for competitive intelligence activities. Prominent CI activities include:

• Finding open innovation or licensing partners – Literature research can help in finding the right partner for open innovation or licensing. If a company has already started work on a technology, they can use literature references to find partners that are working in the same industry to accelerate the development of the technology and launch it in the market before others do so.

• Accelerating the innovation cycle – A thorough study of NPL along with patents helps accelerate the innovation cycle from ideation to commercialization. As universities initially publish only a fraction of their research in patents, no technology landscape or problem-solution analysis is complete without looking at non-patent literature.

• Exploring research direction and investment prospecting – Extracting hidden technologies from patent and NPL datasets and making it easy to analyse them can help uncover hidden opportunities and complementary application areas for your research. If your idea is not exactly novel, you can combine it with someone else’s work to make it novel.