Data empowers users across your organization to make informed business decisions and perpetuate strategic initiatives. For intellectual property teams, data can provide powerful insights regarding patents and their performance, as well as shine light on opportunities on which the organization can capitalize. Here are five questions which data can answer about your organization’s patent portfolio:
Which patents are most valuable?
Intellectual property management systems can tie specific products or product families to all the intellectual property assets associated with them. Members of the intellectual property team can easily pull reports of a product’s revenue and unit performance and drill down to the pinpoint success to the patent level. Using this data, the organization can make informed decisions on which patents are most valuable to invest in further.
How can we generate more revenue from existing patents?
Using the performance data outlined above, the intellectual property team can also discern which patents are no longer strategic opportunities for the organization and can be used to generate revenue opportunities in nontraditional ways. For example, if a patent is no longer core to the organization’s product strategy, it can still be licensed to other organizations to generate additional cash flow.
Do we have any competitive opportunities?
Patent performance data can also indicate which assets are being underutilized or underinvested in. Comparing this data against industry data like competitive hotspots, companies entering the market, and consumer demand can help reveal which products, markets, or audience can be valuable competitive opportunities and should be funded.
How can we improve intellectual property processes?
Operational processes can be valuable opportunities to realize time and cost savings (while also saving the intellectual property team from headaches). Using an intellectual property management solution can also show users where processes are experiencing bottlenecks and can be improved. For example, if new innovation rate is slowed the intellectual property team can have the visibility to see that innovations are halted during a difficult invention disclosure process. They can then invest in technology and change management to streamline that part of the process.
How can we use our resources most effectively?
Perhaps most importantly, intellectual property data can give the organization critical insight into which areas are the best to invest time, human, and financial resources. Particularly for organizations scaling rapidly with limited resources, this insight can be incredibly powerful, allowing the organization to remain flexible with investment in order to optimize value.
Measuring the performance of your organization’s patent portfolio and processes is critical for organizations looking to optimize investment and resource usage, while creating a strong operational backbone for future success. An intellectual property management solution, like Decipher, can provide this data and recommendations to help achieve these objectives. One Decipher customer was able to flexibly rearrange investment in order to leverage their intellectual property assets effectively and realize a 150% return on investment. Read the case study to learn more.
