Strategic IP Review

Our strategic IP review process is used to guide clients into ‘world’s best practice’ in their approach to intellectual property.  This enables the company to save costs, avoid risk and perhaps more importantly take up opportunities which would otherwise be missed.

If you want to learn more, then here are some thoughts from our blog on the topic:

1. Reviewing your approach to IP
2. How to generate an effective list of IP action points
3. Prioritising your IP action points
4. 5 ways to analyse your product or service IP Strategy
5. What are your real IP policies and what to do about them

Context is incredibly important, so we have designed the analysis to be very flexible.  It can be undertaken in 2 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours or even 20 minutes (depending on our client’s needs, time available, etc).  The outcomes of a strategic review vary depending on the client and their context and cut across many areas of the business.  As an example, some of the outcomes might include actions and recommendations on how to:

• Analyze product-specific IP issues and build robust IP strategies around each of them to maximize returns and reduce costs.  (Whether this be for offensive or defensive purposes.)
• Increase the number of commercially viable offers resulting from R&D activities by using patent and IP strategy reviews as a way to guide the R&D activities in areas that show high market need while in the same time educating the department around documentation keeping and other.
• Incorporate best practices approaches to intellectual property issues into your current internal processes.  (These might include for example, disclosure, capture and utilization of new intellectual property, scanning the landscape for relevant new IP created by third parties, and so on.)
• Align the IP portfolio of the company to its business goals to reinforce your competitive advantage.  This directly impacts revenue and may also be used to increase your bargaining power, ward off infringers, create good will and so on.
• Create a series of robust internal policies and procedures in relation to such things as third party infringements, freedom to operate, litigation preparedness, negotiations, employee IP, and so on.

The outcome of the review is a practical and easily actionable set of tasks, prioritized to ensure that the most important issues are addressed first.  This action item list is usually maintained in a client-specific site within Nucleus, our secure online area which you will be given access to.  The diagram below depicts a typical site created for a client to manage issues such as these.   (This one is created for a fictional client, called ‘Mitford’.)

The picture above shows a Gantt chart for IP action points which arose from the strategic review process.  It also shows links on the left to other areas for management of your IP portfolio, agreements, freedom to operate, etc.  The Gantt chart and online action list approach means that you can easily evolve the list over time to modify and remove old issues and add and manage new issues as they arise.  It also makes collaboration by relevant people much easier.