
The final step in this competitive assessment process is to get ideas for new ventures. Preferably these are associated with the company’s current core competencies. One way to do this is to look at the landscape maps. Art located in the blue oceans is “not like the other art” by definition because of the way the map is made. As seen in the “Blue Ocean Opportunities” figure the art contained in the landmasses can be subtracted from the total amount of art in the dataset to reveal the Blue Ocean art. This Blue Ocean dataset can be segmented for art published in the last five years. The segmentation is done because of the art is old and still standing by itself it is not likely to be of commercial value. If the quantity of recent art is small the team can evaluate the patents quickly by hand. If the dataset is larger, it can be further screened by looking at art which is highly cited by others. In this example case, art was found that led the project team to consider several new applications. These opportunities included insulating materials, thermal dye transfer, photographic elements, and color diffusion as shown in the “Blue Ocean Documents” figure.

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