Enhance Your IP Portfolio Management with AQX®: Part 1
IP Business Management | Patent Management
March 3, 2022
Portfolio Management is a critical activity for Intellectual Property (IP) departments. IP Professionals are expected to know their portfolios inside and out, articulate the opportunities available, track competitor activities and their related implications, all the while becoming a full partner to the business, actively involved in strategic business decisions. With improved analytics and automation technology at their fingertips, IP attorneys and portfolio managers have moved beyond their operational roles to strategic advisors to the business. In this two-part series on portfolio management, we are going to delve deeper into how this area of IP has evolved, and how the Portfolio Management tool in AQX® helps make managing IP easier for attorneys and portfolio managers.
What is Strategic IP Portfolio Management?
Patent portfolio management helps a company coordinate its IP strategy with its product and technology strategy. It also ensures portfolio managers are maximizing monetization opportunities and managing budgets and investments required to maintain the portfolio effectively. IP portfolio management helps a company by:
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- Improving brand position and freedom to operate and design, minimizing infringement exposure at a reasonable cost and minimum risk.
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- Enabling a company to enjoy sustained market differentiation, higher market valuation, and expanded opportunities for growth, investment, partnership, and M&As.
IP Strategy Alignment with Business Goals
Companies strive to gain market share and identify new areas of opportunity in adjacent markets that leverage their core capabilities. Most companies today have technology teams and supporting IP attorneys distributed around the globe. They need to be on the same page about the technology areas of interest and ready to provide technology landscapes at the earliest possible stage for new areas that a company is contemplating entering. This requires early identification of the players and understanding of what intellectual property assets they have and how they might influence the goals of achieving sustainable differentiation and market advantage.
Conducting detailed and deep technical analyses, synthesizing them, and preparing polished results for senior management reviews is always a challenge for portfolio managers. Detailed competitive landscape reports are typically developed every quarter for major competitors, with annual updates for others. It is important to find a balance between conducting comprehensive searches and extensive internal discussions to mitigate freedom of operations risks.
Strategic IP Portfolio Management: How?
Effective portfolio management requires excellence throughout the IP lifecycle, starting from IDF submission, patent committee review, foreign filing decisions, and prosecution support to annuity decisions. It also requires a balance between the quantity and quality of the patent portfolio. IP teams comprising IP attorneys and portfolio managers undertake a range of analytical activities such as formal portfolio reviews, reviews by individual areas, such as technology, or the stage of development for a given technology area.
It is important to have a complete understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of any asset. For example, are patents blocking competitors or causing competitors to design around the patents? Although the job of developing the patent portfolio never ends, once the assets begin to reach a critical mass it becomes equally important to tactically manage the IP portfolio.
A well-thought-out pruning process helps identify patents or families of patents portfolios that are no longer strategic to the company and could be candidates for licensing or abandonment. This informs which patents will continue to be maintained. This necessary exercise can yield substantial cost savings. While strategic abandonment can yield substantial cost savings, offensive use of the portfolio to monetize or assert in case of infringements is sometimes necessary to generate revenue or to license the technology to adjacent markets.
AQX Portfolio Management Development Process
Portfolio Managers need to be able to conduct competitive analysis leveraging external patent data, collaborate with colleagues and outside counsel, and effectively articulate their recommendations, often using visualization tools to make their points. Anaqua customers have leveraged portfolio management capabilities offered by the IP Review module for many years, but their needs have evolved significantly.
To understand the requirements for the patent portfolio management module, Anaqua formed a Client Working Group starting with two large corporate clients. Even though IP portfolio management processes differed significantly among the clients, a common set of processes and requirements led us to develop an industry-wide framework for portfolio management. This led to the release of the first version of AQX Portfolio Management. We continue to work with our clients to provide evolving industry-leading solutions to their IP portfolio management needs.
In the second part of this series, we go through the key features of AQX Portfolio Management and how it can help you manage your portfolio effectively.
