Citation Competitor Intelligence

Overview

Media and patent databases cover most commercial competitors. But a significant class of competitors — especially in deep-tech fields where university research drives commercialization — never appears in industry news. They exist in academic citation networks: another professor whose group published similar results six months later, or a postdoc who built on your advisor's work and just spun out a company.

Core insight: Academic citation networks encode technology evolution timelines. By tracing citation threads — backward (who did this first?) and forward (who built on this?) — you can discover competitors that industry databases miss, often years before they appear in commercial registries.

This skill implements a 7-step workflow for both directions: