Intellectual property is a strategic asset for an organization, which when leveraged effectively, can provide lasting advantage. At each stage in your organization’s journey, intellectual property challenges evolve and your intellectual property management strategy will also need to evolve. From securing your first intellectual property rights as a start-up, to perpetuating innovation in a mature organization, and everything in between, here’s a look at how intellectual property challenges change as your company scales.

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:

A balanced intellectual property (IP) portfolio helps your organization to leverage its IP assets most effectively, ensures flexibility to adjust for strategic or unexpected changes, and optimizes use of IP management resources. Maintaining a balanced IP portfolio requires diligent monitoring of assets and their uses, but how can your organization tell when the portfolio has become imbalanced? Here are 4 signs to watch out for:

For scaling companies, intellectual property can be used to protect core functionality, to maintain competitive edge, as a point of leverage for investment, and more. However, it can be difficult for an already time-strapped, growing company to strategically consider the dynamic structure and ongoing management of its intellectual property portfolio, but these actions can be a driving factor in the company’s success. Here are six tips to help your team build and manage a dynamic intellectual property portfolio as your organization grows.

There’s a lot of information out there on if your idea can be patented and how to do it. While this information is most definitely useful, what it doesn’t tell you is if your idea should be patented. Many large organizations may have strategies to patent any idea which comes along, but for companies just starting out or scaling to growth, it can be more difficult to tell if it’s necessary to protect ideas with patents and it can be tempting not to as a means to save a little cash.

Your organization’s intellectual property is a valuable financial and strategic asset, which should be protected and managed mindfully. Unfortunately, the intellectual property management process runs the risk of being deprioritized in many organizations due to misconceptions about scaling and human tendency to prefer comfortable, traditional methods. Compared to manual methods, an intellectual property management system streamlines the process and makes it easier for your organization to identify strategic opportunities, but how do you determine whether or not implementation of a software is worth it?

Intellectual property management professionals are tasked with protecting, leveraging, and commercializing the great ideas and inventions of their organizations. The ability to monetize and gain competitive advantage from these new ideas relies heavily on the IP team, yet some of the fundamentals tend to get lost.

Intellectual property (IP) management solutions are a valuable tool for any company because they allow for organization of IP assets and visibility into which assets can be used most impactfully for the business. For that reason, in an ideal world, every company would have an IP management solution. However, for companies who are rapidly scaling, it may be more difficult to allocate capital to investing in such a solution, despite their many benefits. So how can these organizations tell when an IP management solution becomes a necessity?

If you’re considering implementing an intellectual property (IP) management system, there are a few options available to you. You could either work with your in-house IT team to develop the system from scratch, or you can purchase a pre-built, out-of-the-box solution. In most cases, the latter is the better choice since it is easier to implement and allows more flexibility for scaling organizations. Pre-built solutions provide a host of other benefits:

Creating a strategy for your organization’s intellectual property can be critical for both emerging and mature companies alike. Above all else, a patent strategy can create scope for an organization. Similar to what a business plan provides for the company as a whole, a patent strategy provides a “bigger picture” view for what the patent looks like now and perhaps more importantly, what it will look like in the future. This view enables the organization to leverage the patent continuously and create sustainable competitive advantage. Additionally, for emerging companies, a well-thought out patent strategy can be a signal of commitment to investors or stakeholders.