Many intellectual property strategies don’t fail because they were poorly designed. They fail because nothing changes after the sign-off. New McKinsey research in Harvard Business Review — How to Ensure Your Company Acts on Your New Strategy — puts numbers on the problem for business strategy in general: across more than 400 companies, the ability to mobilise a strategy, not the brilliance of the strategy itself, is the biggest differentiator between top and bottom performers. The most telling finding is anchoring — at most large companies, spending allocations correlate more than 90% year to year, so resource allocation barely moves no matter how much the world has. Every IP leader will recognise the pattern. The filing budget mirrors last year’s. Renewals are paid by habit. The jurisdiction list hasn’t been re-examined since it was written. On paper the company has a new IP strategy; in the patent portfolio, it is still running the old one. And competitors read your register, not your strategy deck.

Three checks that show whether your IP strategy is real

The durable lesson for IP portfolio management is that mobilisation is permanent work, not a one-off project. Three checks are worth running now.

First, reallocation: run an IP audit against your stated priorities and ask what you would file, renew and abandon if this year’s budget had no memory of last year’s — as I argued in The Quiet Decay: Why IP Value Slips When No One Is Watching, value erodes fastest where attention runs on autopilot.

Second, precision: an intellectual property strategy vague enough to survive every meeting is too vague to execute, so be explicit about what you will stop protecting, not just what you will protect — the distinction at the heart of The Difference Between a Strategy, a Plan, and a Process.

Third, ownership: the people who must act — R&D, product, finance — should shape IP choices before they are final, the same dynamic I explored in AI Transformation Is Not a Strategy Problem — It’s an Ownership Problem.

The companies that get outsized commercial returns from intellectual property treat execution as a standing discipline, reviewed as often as the business changes. A simple test to finish on: if your portfolio would look the same whether or not your strategy existed, you don’t yet have an IP strategy — you have a document.