The following is the text:
Intellectual property executives want intellectual property to be the primary consideration for enterprises and investors, but this is not always the case. In the increasingly globalized environment, the more urgent need may be to speed up research and development, reduce manufacturing costs, and attract more customers or pressure from customers. In a word, global competition and accelerated technology research and development have fundamentally changed the management mode of enterprises.
However, because of this, intellectual property rights have become the pillar of the success of major market leaders. This raises a question: What's the difference between market leaders and their competitors? 20 15 what are the main business challenges that managers should consider?
Based on the changes in patents and markets, the following are five major challenges faced by managers, which directly affect R&D departments, legal teams, innovation teams and even financial departments.
Challenge 1: the core action of changing intellectual property rights
20 14 Many changes have taken place in the legal and commercial environment, and the long-term results of intellectual property procedures will affect many enterprises. The patent reform in the United States has led to an increase in the use of intellectual property examination, which has become the "first stop" for competitors to examine patents held by patentees, and the cost is not high. The changes in software patentability in American patent law have reduced the value of many patent portfolios. 20 14, the existing intellectual property rights or intellectual property rights applications of enterprises will undoubtedly be different on 20 15.
The change of intellectual property environment is no different from the change of technology platform or standard in technology market. Therefore, a short-term measure is needed to re-formulate and review intellectual property plans and outputs. This challenge will make all executives who take the intellectual property plan as part of the 20 15 enterprise strategy take the above short-term measures.
Challenge 2: Need to modify the IP implementation and defense plan.
The change of litigation cost of intellectual property law enforcement and defense means that the strategies of competitors and NPE are also changing. Although litigation is not always cheap in the short term, in fact, commercial litigation will bring higher return on investment [ROI] in the long term. With the decrease of litigation volume of 20 14, ErichSpangenberg predicts that 20 15 will be reduced by 50%, and the oversupply of intellectual property litigation talents also brings opportunities to negotiate different pricing structures.
Therefore, it is necessary to formulate a new strategy and budget in the field of intellectual property monetization and defense. Especially for the long-term monetization of investment portfolio, under the necessity that quality exceeds quantity, all directors need to ensure that the intellectual property rights generated by enterprises have a promising future.
Challenge 3: Intellectual property information is more valuable than intellectual property data.
Analyzing patent office data has never been so simple. Many companies provide patent situation analysis services, which can be easily completed within the enterprise. However, for executives, the challenge is how to turn data into intellectual property business intelligence. Technology or patent situation is a good puzzle, but it is useless unless it can combine market data to change the management measures of intellectual property and non-intellectual property executives.
For executives, the challenge is to turn intellectual property data into intelligence information as a step of the overall business strategy.
Challenge 4: Top management should promote forward-looking intellectual property acquisition.
The perfect storm to improve the intellectual property portfolio has come: intellectual property transactions have increased again and the purchase price has a downward trend. There may be no reserve price for patent valuation, but it challenges all executives to identify and purchase relevant intellectual property rights before competitors or NPE realize this benefit. The second challenge is to persuade the top management to use today's capital to build the future intellectual property portfolio, which is the tension between short-term behavior and long-term interests.
Challenge 5: The status quo is no longer valid.
Based on the above challenges, it is obvious that the intellectual property management that was effective two months ago will no longer be effective. Budgets and plans need to be adjusted according to the above new challenges, and different industries need to be differentiated to solve them.
For example, the intellectual property war of smart phones may be reduced, but other industries are ready to break out the monetization and implementation of intellectual property rights. Such as energy, oil and gas, automobiles, health, Internet of Things, and banks.
Considering that competitors with intellectual property rights and NPE make use of the existing patent gap, simple intellectual property management will make companies in these industries fall behind.
The above challenges revolve around the changing needs of intellectual property management. Why? Because pure intellectual property management cannot properly handle the fundamental changes brought by global competition and rapid technological research and development to enterprise management.
To this end, there are three key measures that can be used to meet the above challenges.
Measure 1: Understand the new intellectual property environment.
We can see that some industries and sub-industries are in litigation, and the rhythm, breadth, geographical coverage and transferee of intellectual property indicators are on the rise. Although a lot of data can be obtained through patent analysis, it is more important to obtain business intelligence from these data, not just simple data trends.
Specifically, it is more important to understand the changes in the intellectual property environment at the market level through the following measures:
1, investigating patent trends
View and understand the patent trends of major commercial industries and supporting industries. Patent trends include the number of patents and technical classification, so as to gain a deeper understanding of R&D plans of top companies and competitors. This includes understanding the indicators related to litigation, and the opportunities for practicing entities and non-practicing entities to consider offensive income.
2. Investigate the trend of technology mergers and acquisitions.
Check and understand where the complementary technology is obtained. The supplement of M&A now will be the direct competition in the future. For example, five years ago, the automobile industry was supplemented by a GPS company that could provide third-party map equipment. Today, the same technology is embedded in the car display. From the perspective of the patent protection period of 20 years, it is not only important to change the patent trend of competitors, but also to change the patent trend of supplements.
Measure 2: readjust the patent objectives.
Adjust the internal patent objectives to adapt to the external intellectual property environment and ensure that the implementation of the plan will produce a more targeted investment portfolio. We should not only consider the actual influence of adjustment on internal groups, but also consider the mutual influence on important external plans such as strategic direction and cooperative relationship of enterprises.
Specifically, the following measures can be taken:
1, to create the best combination positioning.
The best portfolio can be distinguished by portfolio size, geographical coverage, evidence of claim scope and use scope, portfolio growth plan and other measures. Based on the above patent trends and technical trends, the combination positioning should consider how existing applications, new applications and claims need to be changed to achieve the required combination.
2, clear resource impact
Whether it is done by external lawyers or insiders, it is impossible to adjust the portfolio without resources. It is important to clearly understand the actual budget demand and human resource changes of the best investment portfolio.
Measure 3: Establish a leading position in intellectual property rights.
Unless the team can implement the strategy towards the goal, it is worthless to just formulate the strategy. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a clear attribution of responsibility and transfer the results from the inventor to a wider level.
This measure can be accomplished by the following tasks:
1, education, consciousness and sense of belonging
The new plan requires the team to understand that the expectation of intellectual property rights has changed and the output based on this team will also change. For the technical team, it may be a change from the general patent field to a specific and important technology. For the legal team, it may be a change from patent scale to "application quality" index. For executives, this may be a change in the way intellectual property reports and indicators are discussed.
2. Intellectual property responsibility
Based on the above two operations, once we understand the intellectual property environment and establish a new plan to deal with changes, we need to clarify the attribution of responsibility. According to the state and scale of the enterprise, there are various definitions of "responsibility attribution", but fundamentally, it is necessary to clarify at what level within the organization who is responsible for the successful realization of the goal. To this end, the ultimate leader must be the director in charge of reviewing the patent direction, quality and indicators in the organization. Just reducing the annual "application scale KPI" of patent indicators cannot establish leadership for organizations to manage today's intellectual property changes.
Summary: strategy, process and people
Previously, we investigated why intellectual property management alone could not effectively manage intellectual property rights. On this basis, we identified three key measures that business leaders and management teams can take.
In recent years, the speed of technological progress is changing the way of intellectual property rights. In the next few years, enterprises related to intellectual property have one thing in common: they all need to redefine their intellectual property strategies, improve their intellectual property processes and redeploy their intellectual property resources.