Author: Thomas DeFelice

Questions Your IP Counsel Should Ask When Performing Competitive Monitoring & Analysis

Ongoing competitive monitoring seeks to create a dynamic portrait of the overall patent activity within your competitive sphere, while competitive landscape analysis provides a broader view of technology trends and developments. Both efforts work in concert with each other to help you know your competition, mitigate infringement risks, and identify licensing and acquisition opportunities. Crucially, competitive monitoring and landscape analysis help identify the guideposts for your own innovation initiatives.

6 Things You Can Do Right Now to Shore Up Your IP Position

The project of establishing and adopting an enterprise-wide IP strategy is a necessarily long and intricate one. Comprehensive alignment of your overall business strategy with your IP objectives may feel daunting. There are, however, several relatively simple yet deeply effective steps you can take to establish IP as a priority within your company’s culture.

Understanding Your IP Position: Fostering a Culture of IP Awareness

The next step in your development as an IP-aligned organization is to begin fostering an enterprise-wide culture of IP awareness such that everyone within your company’s innovation ecosystem possesses a mindset rooted in the understanding of the value and importance of your intangible assets, and is armed with the tools and incentives they need to effectively carry out their roles in your IP strategy.

Understanding Your Current IP Position: Three Priorities to Begin Assessing

“Aligning your business strategy with your IP objectives in order to maximize enterprise value and garner a competitive edge begins with putting in place the infrastructure to understand your company’s dynamic IP position. Maintaining an evolving knowledge of what assets you hold, the IP-related clauses that pertain to them, and what gaps you may have to address in your IP is the first step toward universal and prevailing IP awareness throughout your organization.

These systems and practices will help you think about your IP as actual monetized assets, not just perfunctory insurance. They will encourage you to account for IP as a major component of your larger business goals, helping your enterprise strategically as it grows.”

Building an IP Aligned Enterprise: Leveraging, Monetizing, and Enforcing Your IP Assets

Understanding the value of your IP more generally is a fundamental factor in making decisions around how to manage your portfolio. Patents and trademarks, for example, require regular investment in the form of annuities or fees to maintain your ownership rights. If a particular asset or group of assets aren’t contributing to the value of your company, then you need to decide whether or not to pay the money to maintain your proprietary rights. If you do decide to maintain your IP, perhaps you’ve assessed that the value of those assets lies in your ability to license or sell them. Having a clear framework for these decisions and opportunities can not only save money in paying fees but provide new revenue opportunities.”