MARKET RESEARCH
Inventor-Movement Signal from Patent Filings to Linear
Tracks which inventors appear on a competitor's new filings, flags newly-appearing or departed inventors as hiring and R&D signals, and opens a Linear issue to investigate.
How it runs
The automated pipeline, trigger to output.
- TriggerWeekly schedule
- ActionPull recent applicationsExa
- ActionScrape inventor list and claimsFirecrawl
- LogicDiff inventors against known roster
- ActionSummarize new inventor's tech focusOpenAI
- OutputOpen Linear investigation issueLinear
What it does
Beyond the claims, the inventor list on a patent is a leak about who a competitor hired and which teams are active. This workflow extracts inventor names from new filings, compares them against the roster it has seen before, and flags both new inventors (possible recent hires or new focus areas) and the technology they are working on. Each meaningful signal becomes a Linear issue for the competitive-intel team to chase down.
When to use it
Use it when you care about talent and R&D-direction signals, not just legal overlap. Useful for founders, recruiters, and strategy teams reading a competitor's org moves through their patent output.
How it works
- 1A scheduled trigger runs weekly.
- 2Exa pulls the competitor's recently published applications.
- 3Firecrawl scrapes each filing's inventor list and claims.
- 4A logic step diffs the inventor names against previously recorded inventors to isolate first-time appearances.
- 5An OpenAI step summarizes the tech area each new inventor is working on and why it may matter.
- 6A Linear issue is created per signal with the inventor, tech area, and investigation prompt.
Set it up
What you configure once, before turning it on.
- 1Connect ExaNeural search across the web.
- 2Connect FirecrawlCrawl, scrape, structured extract.
- 3Connect OpenAIModels, embeddings, files.
- 4Connect LinearIssues, projects, cycles, triage.
- 5Set each agent's modelWe leave models unset so you pick the tier — fast + cheap, or top-quality.
- 6Tune it to your dataEdit the prompts, filters, and field mappings so it matches how your team works.
- 7Test, then turn it onRun once against a sample, confirm the output, then enable the trigger.
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Run it inside a business
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Run this workflow in your colony.
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