When you think about Sony Corporation, the first things that may come to mind are television, audio systems, cameras, and gaming consoles, such as the PS3. But when you look into their filing histories of patents, you can also come across technologies that you may never have thought about.
A patent is defined as a government authority or licenses conferring a right or title for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention. By looking at technologies a company develops, internal discoveries of a company can be discovered in order to develop predictions into of the company’s innovation plan. You can forecast the sectors they are investing in and the new markets they are attempting to enter.
For example, Sony Corp published a patent on March 3, 2016, for a “Pair of contact lenses, contact lens, and storage medium”. They also recently applied for a patent on “Embedding biometric data from a wearable computing device in the metadata of a recorded image”.
This may indicate that Sony is moving into more biometric type products and potentially be moving to disrupt the contact lens industry. It may also indicate that Sony is expanding their technology to potentially enhance their current products, such as their gaming console with enhanced user experience potentially tracking movements differently.
