Konica Minolta, Inc. (Konica Minolta) announced that Clarivate Plc, a U.K.-based global information service company (Clarivate), named Konica Minolta among the Top 100 Global Innovators 2022 (Top 100 Innovators). To create this list, Clarivate uses its own intellectual property and patent data to identify companies and organisations that have met the qualifying criteria of having filed 500 or more patent applications since 2000 and been granted 100 or more patents during the past five years, and then evaluates the identified candidates in terms of four factors – “Influence,” “Success,” “Globalisation” and “Technical distinctiveness.” Starting from the selection of Top 100 Innovators 2022, Clarivate places greater importance than before on the value of individual inventions in the process of assessing innovativeness.
Supporting business plans with intellectual property strategies
Under “Transform 2016” and “SHINKA 2019,” its medium-term business plans implemented between fiscal 2014 and 2019, Konica Minolta worked on transforming its business portfolios in anticipation of the growth of paperless transactions. To support these plans, the company launched an intellectual property strategy focusing on acquiring basic patents, as well as on quantifying and improving the quality of its patents. Currently, Konica Minolta is transforming its business portfolios through digital transformation (DX) centering on its proprietary imaging IoT platform under DX2022, a new medium-term business plan that started in fiscal 2020. To support this plan, the company is implementing an intellectual property strategy to facilitate the transformation of its patent portfolios by concentrating its intellectual property resources on those patents that can be true sources of corporate competitiveness, such as imaging AI technology.
Konica Minolta believes that its inclusion on the list of Top 100 Innovators 2022 is evidence that the high-quality patent portfolios it has built through these strategies have been recognised as “highly valuable intellectual properties that can generate innovations.”
With the understanding that intellectual properties are the source of value creation, Konica Minolta remains committed to creating new values that bring innovations to society, and building high-quality intellectual property portfolios that facilitate business growth by continuing appropriate investments.
