2 steps forward on the road to unlocking the world's business information

For almost as long as CB Insights has been around, we've gotten the question from clients using the CBI platform about market sizings to answer the age-old "How large is that market?" question.

Historically, we didn't have an answer.

And we've also known for some time that analyzing patents via machine learning would unlock insight into emerging technology momentum and competitor strategy.

I'm very excited that this past week we delivered on both of these big initiatives.

Patent Analytics - An Unfair Way to Gather Technology and Competitive Intelligence

We just rolled out Patent Analytics which clients are already using to do many things including:

• Anticipate competitor strategy
• Track emerging technology momentum
• Discover industry trends
• Identify partner or acquisition targets

We highlighted several patent analytic cases studies here on Walmart, Disney, CRISPR and autonomous vehicles which illustrate the above use cases.

Raw patent info has been around for a long time but given their volume, variety and velocity, they've never been useful. The graphic below shows why.

Just Walmart's patents since 2017 (500+ patents) have 7,026 pages and over 3.5 million words. By way of comparison, War & Peace, The Odyssey, Lord of the Flies, and Romeo and Juliet have a combined 794,913 words. So reading all of Walmart’s patents since just 2017 is like reading all 4 books 4.5 times each.

Putting aside the time it would take to read all of them, the reality is that the human brain cannot process that kind of information even if the time was available.

Market Sizings - Understanding Total Addressable Market Using the Industry Analyst Consensus

Wall Street has their "Street Expectation" for earnings estimates.

We just developed the Industry Analyst Consensus (IAC) for quantifying market sizes.

Market sizes are critical for our clients in major strategic decisions they make around:

• Which markets should we enter?
• What are the adjacent markets that might be available if we enter a market?
• What products should we build?
• What is the appropriate level of marketing budget to allocate to a market?
• Should we enter a market via M&A? And if yes, what might we be willing to pay?
• What type of talent will we need to recruit to be credible in and win a market?
• How can we see the new markets our competitors are attacking?

I won't go into detail on the very novel (and ingenious) way we're creating market sizings by aggregating industry analyst estimates because that is detailed here.

At present, we have sizings for 12,050 markets from more than 1700 industry analysts, and this grows as our technology mines more unstructured sources for more estimates.

We detail why the wisdom of a wise crowd of analysts provides better market sizes in the post.

And finally, a note about the CB Insights team.

Patent Analytics and Market Sizings were 2 massive undertakings. And to launch them one right after the other is a phenomenal accomplishment.

Sometimes, you feel like a company is getting in a zone (a groove or a rhythm if you prefer).

It's a great feeling - like a flywheel is turning.

And our engineering, R&D, product and product marketing teams certainly seem to be in the zone. Congrats to them on a job well done for Patent Analytics and Market Sizings.

And the best part is that the momentum is building.

For those of you who are clients of CB Insights, stay tuned. A lot more great stuff is coming soon. We promise.

If you want to be part of a great engineering or data science team and like to get stuff done and ship amazing products, we are hiring for a data scientist - NLP and a data engineer. We're also hiring across every other area as well.