Do you have a handle on your jointly owned IP, and monitoring obligations and royalties?
Are you inundated with preparing and tracking IP contracts such as confidentiality agreements?
Are IP matters farmed out to a law firm who only work on one-off projects, and nothing more?
Is it a challenge to catalog your IP portfolio by business, value, strength and cost?
What is your company doing to elevate the quality and strengthen your IP?
Do you proactively mine ideas from your organization for potential IP protection?
Are your IP assets strategically categorized for importance to the business, and current?
Have you a defined strategy for what, how and where to obtain, protect and maintain IP?
Do you have a process and a strategy for reviewing potential new ideas for IP protection?
Do you have structured and documented processes and procedures in place for managing IP?
IP Excellence must include world-class IP Management, the proactive process for aligning IP tactics, plans, and decisions with the IP Strategy.
IP Management must be a core competency for protecting investment in technology, securing exclusionary advantages, and maintaining business and shareholder value.
IP Management requires unified process and systems for ensuring that IP assets are properly identified, quickly and cost effectively acquired, strategically maintained, carefully protected and policed, and proactively utilized, achieving the highest return on your investment in IP.
IP Management will enhance global competitive positions by securing legal protections for technology, products and services, and minimize legal risk with timely identification and evaluation of competitive IP consistent with the highest ethical standards.
IP Management will drive competitive awareness, technology focus and direction, options for monetization, licensing and partnership, and business involvement in decisions all of which are designed for maximizing your resources.
IP Management involves critical administrative processes and procedures, and organizational systems for receiving ideas, recording decisions, monitoring and maintaining IP portfolios, facilitating reviews, tracking contracts and licenses, and budget forecasting and controls.
Implementing world-class IP Management takes the most time to rollout because the speed is highly dependent on your existing systems and process being used. Documenting the processes for IP Management is important with the goal being to integrate the solution into your current organizational structure and processes. Changes should be made if it is necessary to improve or enhance the efficiency or quality of your existing IP Management processes.
Transparency and understanding of spend is realizable relatively quickly with a basic IP Management database, and once IP Management is in place the degree of granularity into spend becomes clearer. If you have nothing in place, development and implementation will depend on available resources, and the extent of your current IP or number of specific businesses within your company.