Strategic IP Asset Creation
An IP strategy that is seen as an integral part of corporate strategy, will significantly improve the ownership position of an innovative company regarding its own innovations. This ensures that an innovative company can harvest the profits from its own innovations. Such an IP strategy also influences the organizational development of innovation functions of the company. One goal is to trigger a reaction of the R & D organization of the company to so-called "white spots" in the IP strategy which aims to fill the respective gaps in the technology map for the company resulting in the medium term in a "seamless" IP protection shield for all strategically relevant key technologies. The SIPAC method (strategic IP asset creation) is successfully used in various industries to implement such a value-based IP management approach. It helps to integrate your IP strategy with your innovation process under value-oriented aspects.
Open Innovation
Industrial clusters play a key role in the competitiveness of SMEs. The reasons for this are
- the sharing of know-how,
- the aggregation of R & D resources in order to achieve a critical mass of investment,
- the acceleration of innovations with respect to open innovation,
- the market development with effective technology transfer and exploitation.
Therefore, the management of Intellectual Property is of particular importance for technology development. Advantageously, software tools should be used for open innovation that will enable clear documentation of respective partner IP contributions, adjusting the IP to future development results and to assign it to the respective exploitation steps (IP pooling, Licensing).
IP Engineering
IP Engineering can be used to systematically generate ne IPRs and to develop in particular such inventions which often remain unrecognized in companies. Advantageously, IP engineering workshops are led by experienced technology experts and engineers of the company to identify the valuable hidden inventions and to describe the inventions in such a way that patent applications can be created with reduced efforts.
The method of IP engineering allows a systematic construction of an effective IP portfolio and should be carried out in small and medium-sized enterprises about twice a year.
Prevention of infringement
When introducing a new product, it is absolutely necessary to reliably assess the patent situation in the target markets to avoid the infringement of third party patent claims, which could radically change the business case (= Product clearing).
A prerequisite is that one can map the description of a product to a plurality of potentially relevant patents. Modern technology accomplishes this task, ideally through the use of semantic-linguistic algorithms which identify and take into account the content of the patented invention, regardless of the current wording of the patent.
Semantic patent search
As can be seen from the high number of rejections by the patent offices many ideas that are considered by the respective inventors as new, were already known in at a least similar way. This happens primarily when a technology is already at a relatively late stage of the technology life cycle. These rejections result in unnecessary expenditures and waste of resources. Therefore it is important to critically compare the content of a potential invention against the known prior art before an application is filed. However, in today's era of globalization this has become a real problem because of the ever increasing numbers of patent. To overcome this problem, one needs powerful tools. The latest development here is the semantic patent search which can assess the content of an invention independent of the particular wording used in the published patent document. The search which is performed on all published worldwide patent documents (an 8-digit number) only takes a few seconds.