Intellectual Asset Management Best Practices

The ipPerformance Group’s Guide to Intellectual Asset Management Best Practice describes the essential intellectual asset management best practices. The practices include the step-by-step process, key stakeholders, and performance metrics. Extensive experience, competencies, and documentation within the ipPerformance Group support these practices. If you have any suggestions, please submit them, and we will evaluate the practice and update our guide.

1 Portfolio

• Provide an annual intellectual asset management report to your business
• Conduct annual portfolio review
• Review the entire intellectual asset portfolio at least once per year
• Properly update appropriate databases with information regarding the status of specific intellectual assets and decisions made about individual intellectual assets
• Manage the cost of patenting activity for your portfolio.
• Identify key patents
• Properly transfer or abandon patents from your portfolio
• Classify your patent portfolio’s pending and issued patents by “business use.”

2 Strategy

• Determine the patent action plan that aligns with your company’s business strategy. (This is also known as patent strategy, IP strategy, or IA strategy.)
• Align intellectual assets to your business units

3 Competitive

• Use of Patent Intelligence (patent trees, patent maps, or patent landscapes)
• Evaluate the need for a competitive assessment and the activity

4 Investment

• Prioritize the disclosures in your portfolio

5 Realization

• Donation of intangible assets to non-profit organizations
• Out-licensing of intellectual assets

6 Valuation

• Valuing Intangible Assets

7 Operations

• Benchmarking of intellectual asset management practices with outside companies
• Internal benchmarking of intellectual asset management practices between business units
• Establishing a contact as an intellectual asset focal point for your business or technology area
• Form and staff an intellectual asset management team
• Facilitate at least one IAM team meeting per year/Conduct IAM-team meeting
• Patent filing recommendations – Establish standard factors
• Patent maintenance recommendations – Establish standard factors
• Recommend/document/implement patent filing recommendations
• Manage trade secrets

The complete best practices with descriptive steps to complete, measures, value points, and functional participants are available in written, audio, and video formats.

Description:
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Value Points:
Why should this be considered a best practice? What benefit is derived over other practices or methods? The points tested for each of the best practices include: quality gain, productivity gain, revenue impact, risk management, cost savings, and other.

Measures:
What type of measurement quantifies the usefulness of this practice?

Typical functional participants:
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