Intellectual property portfolio management

Once businesses reach a certain size, and their marketing and engineering staff have attained a modicum of experience in the filing of patent, trademark, and copyright applications, the focus of the intellectual property strategists can finally shift from a first generation emphasis on raising client awareness of the importance of filing applications to secure intellectual property rights to a second generation emphasis on purposeful intellectual property strategy development.

The development of an effective intellectual property strategy requires interdisciplinary input from the business / marketing, technological, and legal / IP sectors of the business, and the result of such development initiatives are resource allocation decisions which align intellectual property filing, issuance, licensing, and litigation activities with the corporation’s overall strategic objectives.

A key way in which intellectual property strategies yield results which are qualitatively distinct from other components of the corporation’s overall strategic plan is that the corporation’s intellectual property strategies not only focus upon the corporation’s own product development plans, but, in addition, they focus upon ways in which the corporation’s intellectual properties can cover the activities of its principal competitors.  An intellectual property portfolio, groomed in such a manner with care over a period of two to six years, can yield enormous new revenue streams as well as terrific dividends in cross-licensing negotiations.