IP portfolio rationalisation

Rationalising a portfolio of intellectual property rights represents a major challenge for any owner of patents, industrial or academic. Gone are the days when portfolio management met essential quantitative criteria; today we expect a patent manager to reconcile apparently contradictory constraints:

maintain an important and even growing number of new applications
maintain and even increase the quality of IP rights
reduce the costs of portfolio management

An initial stage is the negotiation of costs for outsourced services. This phase, mainly managed by the purchasing department, is however limited when the “market price” of IP consulting services is reached.

EFFECTIVE LEVERS FOR ACTION

Then come effective levers for action:

Set up of IP management control tools
Creation of strategic pertinence indicators for IP rights and the allocated budget
Decision-making methodologies for new rights, preservation, extension or abandon, depending on objective and constant criteria
Simplifying the flow of information between invention detection and declaration, internal and external management, and different French and foreign partners.

IP TRUST has perfectly integrated the constraints of its customers who represent sources of progress. For major patent accounts it has provided portfolio rationalisation assistance that has helped reduce their budget by 25%, without affecting the quality or regeneration policy of the portfolio.

We also have a benchmarking programme for organising IP, for management methods for major patent accounts and price policies for patent applications and extension, examination and granting procedures to identify the most pertinent sources of progress.