How can we use patent data for market research?

Question

While there is an immense amount of publicly available patent documents for any kind of technology, I am wondering how we can use that data in order to evaluate the state of the art of a certain technology, or how can we use patents to map competitors in one market?

For instance, recently there have been many developments in VR/AR technology, such as HoloLens and magic leap. Can a patent professional provide us with relevant information about the advancements in that area?

Patents
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May 09, 2015
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2
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Answers: 2 public & 0 private

110804
Other Consultant

I agree with Prateek, but with one small modification. I do quite a bit of market research on new products, and patents can be very helpful because they are so well indexed compared to general literature. The things I find most useful are the companies to which the patents are assigned, the non-patent literature references, and the inventor names. All of these are good for starting points of more general searches. In addition, the backward references from a closely-matching patent, and the forward references from an older seminal patent, are good for finding other matches.

Google Scholar has done a great job of integrating patents in searches of more general literature, so that is a good place to start.

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