Pure Play Benchmarking for Brokers

Strengthen Thematic Positioning with IP Based Evidence

Executive Summary

Corporate brokers play a critical role in shaping how the market understands and values innovation-led companies, particularly in the run-up to capital events or during thematic repositioning. Insights IDS gives brokers a structured, independent view of how focused a client company is within a defined innovation space. By establishing a benchmark of “theme purity”, the tool enables brokers to quantify competitive positioning, reinforce investor messaging, and validate claims of specialisation.

1. Introduction

Brokers operating in pre-IPO or growth-phase capital markets are often tasked with building conviction around a company’s narrative. But where financial metrics or market comparables are limited or lagging, it becomes harder to anchor positioning in concrete data. Insights IDS addresses this by generating benchmark scores based on patent alignment, showing how much of a company’s research and development is concentrated in a specific innovation theme, and how it compares to similar companies.

2. The Challenge: Innovation Claims Without Evidence

In early-stage markets, many companies position themselves as leaders or specialists in fast-moving sectors (e.g., AI hardware, clean energy materials, synthetic biology). Yet these claims are often hard to verify. Traditional metrics don’t always reflect research intensity or technology focus. Brokers are left relying on narrative alone, a risky foundation for investor trust.

3. The Elute Solution: Quantifying Theme Purity

Insights IDS solves this with a deterministic process:

·       A target company’s dominant patent sectors define an IP boundary, which acts as the thematic lens.

·       All other companies with similar patents are scored based on the proportion of their total patent activity within that boundary.

·       The result is a “theme purity” benchmark, a measure of how focused each company is within that defined space.

This lets brokers position their client not only as part of an innovation theme, but as a demonstrably focused specialist within it.

 4. Strategic Use for Brokers

Insights IDS supports corporate brokers by:

·       Quantifying the degree of focus a client company has within its declared innovation space.

·       Demonstrating “clear blue water” relative to diversified or loosely aligned peers
Providing structured evidence for pre-IPO positioning, research notes, or investor roadshows.

·       Enabling defensible benchmarking across thematically similar firms

This is especially powerful when promoting companies to thematic investors, EIS/VCT funds, or institutional buyers seeking concentrated exposure.

5. So why start with a company, not a sector?

Some may assume a cleaner route is starting with a sector like “AI”, “semiconductors”, “clean energy”, and then identify the pure players within that field. But this breaks down quickly.

First, most sector labels are far too broad. A sector like “AI” could include anything from edge hardware to autonomous navigation, wildly different in terms of focus. Benchmarking a mixed group leads to meaningless scores.

Second, defining a useful sector via selection would require the user to understand patent classification systems at a technical level. That’s not feasible for investors, and exactly the kind of barrier Insights IDS is designed to remove.

Instead, we start with a known innovator. A company already held or known to lead in a particular space. That company’s IP creates a precise theme grounded in data, not guesswork.

Picking a sector first is like asking “Who are the best athletes?”, swimmers or sprinters. You end up with a confused set of comparisons. Starting with a known company is like starting with a top-level swimmer, then asking, “Who else is in their lane?”

It’s specific, investor-friendly, and rooted in evidence, not labels.

5. Conclusion

For brokers involved in promoting high-growth, innovation-led firms, Insights IDS offers a new layer of evidence to strengthen the investment case. It replaces assumption with data, and narrative with structure, helping brokers build trust with investors while improving the clarity and precision of their market-facing materials.