Intellectual Asset Management Best Practices
The ipPerformance Group’s Guides to 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.
Contact ipPerformance to learn more about the Guides.
1. Patent 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. Patent Strategy
- Determine your portfolio’s patent action plan (also known as patent strategy, IP strategy, or IA strategy.)
- Align intellectual assets to your business units
3. Patent Competitive Intelligence
- Use of Patent Intelligence (patent trees, patent maps, or patent landscapes)
- Evaluate the need for a competitive assessment and the activity
4. Patent Investment
- Prioritize the disclosures in your portfolio
5. Patent Value Realization
- Donation of intangible assets to non-profit organizations
- Out-licensing of intellectual assets
6. Valuation
- Valuing Intangible Assets
7. Patent 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 each 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, and implement patent filing recommendations
- Manage trade secrets
