Understand your competitors' R&D from their patents

Workflow: Scouting

1. Describe the task

Tracking a competitor's filings one at a time tells you what they filed, not what they're building toward. Reading fifty patents by hand to find the pattern takes longer than most scouts have for one competitor.

Hand the reading to Prism. Name the competitor and the technology area. Prism pulls their recent filings from the signals pool, groups them into strategic focus areas, and states where those themes create risk or opportunity for you.

Example prompt:

Find patents from Samsung related to advanced display manufacturing, filed in the last two years. Identify R&D themes, and cluster patents into strategic focus areas, so I can understand where they are investing, and how this could pose a threat or opportunity for our company in the competitive landscape.

2. Give context

Required inputs

The competitor's name and a technology area, both stated in the prompt, to scope the search.
A time window, so the clusters reflect current investment rather than a decade of filings.

3. What ITONICS AI creates

Example output:

Patents scouted: Samsung Display and Samsung Electronics filings related to advanced display manufacturing since mid-2024, sorted into four R&D focus areas.

Focus area	Samsung investment signal	Threat level	Your exposed initiative
Quantum dot materials, cadmium-free	High, 53 acquired patents plus active filings	High	NextGen Colour Volume, AGH quantum dot patterning
Anti-reflection surface engineering	High, shipping product in 2026	High	Nano-coating stack (Poznań)
OLED pixel circuit and encapsulation	Very high, multiple granted patents	Medium	ProVision Series (Wrocław OLED)
Adaptive and predictive dimming	Medium, early-stage filings	Low to medium	FPGA local dimming (Gdańsk)

Highest risk: quantum dot materials. A 2025 acquisition of 53 patents from Merck signals a move toward cadmium-free, self-emissive QD displays that would eventually compete at the professional tier, directly overlapping your NextGen Colour Volume initiative.

Recommended next step: run a freedom-to-operate review on the acquired quantum dot patents before your next filing cycle.

Follow-up prompts:

Example prompt:

Which of these focus areas overlap with the technologies we already track on our own radar?

Example prompt:

Pull the same clustering for LG's filings in the same period, and compare.

Example prompt:

Create a technology element for each of these four clusters so we can track them going forward.