Technology manager´s radar screen: Monitoring competitors´ innovation performance

To capture a competitor´s innovation performance, both in terms of its productivity and impact, we propose to characterize its patent portfolio, including both cited and un-cited patents, by a pair of numbers. This pair of numbers, one related to the productivity and the other to the impact of the competitor, is obtained from the centroid of a so-called h-complement area of the citation distribution of the competitor´s portfolio. As such, a large number of competitors´ innovation performance embodied in their portfolios can be simultaneously captured and panoramically observed in a two-dimensional coordinate system. In addition to its simplicity and effectiveness, this approach provides us significant insight into where performance difference among these competitors lies, and allows us to track their performance evolution over time.