Go to Market with Efficient IP Protection: Manage Your IP and Patent Portfolio with ITONICS

As today’s business landscape becomes increasingly boundaryless and open, commercializing and securing a firm’s unique knowledge and technology assets become even more relevant for maintaining a competitive edge. Against this relevance, more than 9 out of 10 patents fail to amortize on the one side, leaving great revenue potentials on the table and incurring unnecessary costs. On the other side, no protection makes these assets easy targets of copycats in a business situation where information collection was never easier. Firms thus need a well-crafted strategy and easy-to-use software to manage their intellectual property (IP) and their IP and patent portfolio to maximize their returns on investment. This article shows how to effectively manage IP and a patent portfolio inside the ITONICS Innovation Operating System and along a unified innovation process.

Maximize your IP and patent portfolio management efficiency

Most successful firms today are successful because they leverage technology uniquely or have built unique knowledge that materializes in pace-making technologies. As such,  unique technologies are a significant asset to generating a sustainable competitive advantage. That is also why, effective protection of a company’s intellectual property (IP) is a must to secure a company’s market position and revenue stream. However, the value generated by IP protection strategies is highly skewed. Only a small number of patents disproportionately add significant value, whereas the large number of patents is of marginal importance. 

In a nutshell: The key business needs covered

• Identify the Right Technology Protection Strategy for Each IP Asset

Say goodbye to scattered spreadsheets and disjointed IP systems. With the ITONICS Innovation OS, organizations can consolidate their entire IP portfolio into a single, user-friendly platform. From patents and trademarks to copyrights and trade secrets, every asset is meticulously cataloged and easily accessible, and each technology receives the right protection strategy.

• Manage your Patent Portfolio

Unlock your patents’ economic potential. Track each patent from your organization in the ITONICS Innovation OS. Easily oversee the categories where your patent portfolio is the strongest, how long you are protected, where, and whom you have allowed to use them.

• Find patents of competitors

Automate the identification of patents in key areas of interest. The ITONICS Innovation OS leverages machine learning algorithms to help you identify patents published by your competitors and emerging start-ups in real time.

Most often, patents are also seen as the obvious (and only) option to protect a firm’s technology portfolio and secure its competitive advantage. Patents grant the right to exclude others from using a technology without authorization. This provides patent-holders with the right to license and collect revenue from other firms that use the technology. In return, they disclose the details of the invention to the public and pay patent filing and maintenance fees. Yet, there is also the risk that the invention becomes public, and no patent is granted or that patent infringers are not identified and sued. 

The often overlooked strategies to protect a firm’s technology intellectual property are informal protection strategies (read more about the different IP protection strategies). Informal arrangements complicate the understanding of a technology’s mechanics and the protection of a firm's technology intellectual property (IP). Complexity, implicit know-how, and being the pioneer in the market often serve as better protection tactics. Complexity and implicit know-how rely on limited access to crucial knowledge. While patents disclose this knowledge, complexity and implicit know-how push potential imitators to figure out the necessary knowledge on their own. Moreover, being fast to market is also effective as it aids in establishing recognition for a specific brand associated with the respective technology.

To help you find the right intellectual property protection strategies, we have compiled an IP protection strategy decision tree that helps you easily identify the right strategy given different factors.

Identify the right technology protection strategy

As your technology portfolio will consist of more than one technology to protect, it will save time and costs when you run the identification of the right intellectual property protection strategy through your Innovation OS. No matter whether you are engaged in technology scouting, foresight, or the management of your company’s technology portfolio, the ITONICS Innovation OS equips you with the features to identify the right strategy for each of your technologies. 

ITONICS offers a rating feature with which you and your technology experts can score each technology given the criteria outlined in the decision tree. Simply define the three rating criteria: diffusion potential, complexity, and urgency. Coupling these criteria with your general company position (Do you have the legal and financial resources for patenting?) will provide you with the necessary information on whether to patent, keep things secret, move to the market fast, or bundle a technology with other technologies.

Once you have entered all relevant technology profile information in your Innovation OS, you can easily share this information with your technology experts and ask them to provide the necessary ratings on the diffusion potential, complexity, and urgency. Based on their judgments, you will easily identify the right IP protection strategy for your technology. 

Taking this further into your technology portfolio, you can keep an easy overview of all IP protection strategies inside the ITONICS Innovation OS by plotting your rich technology portfolio on a radar.

The radar will help you to understand easily what technologies and intellectual property are protected by which protection strategies. The radar is a flexible tool where you can plot the different protection strategies as segments. Each segment of the radar will thus inform you what protection strategy is used for which technology and IP. This view is enhanced by the distance, size/halo, and color criteria which provide further information about each IP. This can represent, for instance, the average evaluation value for the complexity, diffusion potential, or urgency.  

As it is an interactive visualization, the radar can be easily shared with anyone and will help to protect your most important technology assets with the right strategy. It also offers the flexibility to adjust the view to any other criteria that matter to your organization. 

Manage your patent portfolio

As patents remain the most used technology protection strategy (and an underestimated revenue source), organizations need to stay on top of the patents with an active patent portfolio management strategy. The ITONICS Innovation OS takes you away from scattered spreadsheets and disconnected IP systems. With ITONICS, organizations can consolidate their entire patent portfolio into a single, user-friendly platform and start managing it proactively. 

You can store all relevant information about a patent within an individual profile page for each patent. This way, you can easily find the patent status, technical notes, drawings, product examples, submitters, filing dates, and other relevant information for each patent. Furthermore, you can add rating criteria which will help you to easily identify the health of your patent portfolio. For instance, you can track this way the annual return on investment ratios, and relevance of the patent, and complement it with accurate information on the annual costs.

The individual information stored in each patent will thus be the basis to populate your patent portfolio on a radar. By the radar, you can easily identify in which categories you hold the most patents. Plus, the information about the relevance and return on investment can be plotted which shows you in total the health of your patent portfolio. Patents with a low expected return on investment thus become valid candidates for a re-assessment of their revenue potential. Are there options available to trade unutilized patents or to include them in a new license? With the ITONICS Innovation OS controlling your patent portfolio comes at your fingertips.

Find patents of competitors

Next to managing your IP protection strategies and patent portfolio, the ITONICS Innovation OS also allows you to search for patent applications in the fields of your competitive interests. Automatically. The system will automatically inform you once it recognizes a peak in interest. This is particularly interesting for your technology assets and for monitoring which patents your competitors file. The system compares the information you provide with the information competitors provide and recommends to you similar applications.

The Innovation OS also shows you how the interest in a specific topic evolves over time. Our Signals feature lists all relevant and related publications coming from our ITONICS Data Lake and allows you to dive into the specifics of any scientific publication or patent identified. If of interest, you can easily store the patent identified in your Innovation OS and share it with your co-workers as an inspiration, for deeper analysis, and further processing. Do not miss any important development happening and take action in real time.

The ITONICS Innovation OS also allows you to tap into less-known topic areas. In contrast to the Signals Feed which takes the specific information you have entered as context for the search for related patents or scientific publications, our Insights feature is a global search feature by which you can browse into every area of interest. Simply submit a keyword and define how the system should search for you (learn more).

The Innovation OS will respond with a detailed list of news, scientific publications, and patents published around your keyword. By using various filter options, you can easily refine your search results and, for instance, identify the top patent-holding companies, the top patent-holding individuals, or categories/tags.

The Insights feature also helps you in analyzing the development of your search term. Using the timeline visualization, you can easily identify peaks and troughs in the interest of the topic. You will also find the world map that visualizes where the patents originated. If you find interesting patents or publications, you can easily store the signal in your Innovation OS and share it with your co-workers as an inspiration, for deeper analysis, and further processing. Take advantage of it and dive into topic areas that have not been top of your mind so far.

What's next: Map technologies and patents to unlock new revenue potential

Stay on top of your IP and technology protection strategy. Reduce the hassle of activating your IP portfolio and unlock an untapped revenue stream. Map your patents, categorize them, and get an easy overview of your strengths and weaknesses in protecting your technology IP using the ITONICS Innovation OS. Curious about pricing or plans? Our corporate technology experts are ready to assist you in a personal demo session.