It’s Time for Your Intellectual Property Assessment

July 1 marks the midpoint of the year.  This is a perfect time to assess your intellectual property (IP) situation.  If you’ve been neglecting your IP, you are not alone.  Many tech company leaders I’ve talked with have done nothing in the first six months of 2019 to identify and protect their IP assets.

Let’s fix that problem!

You already know that properly protected IP can provide a competitive advantage and protect your valuable innovations from being stolen. Don’t let another 6 months go by without giving serious attention to your high-value IP assets.

I’ve been helping tech companies with Intellectual Property Assessments for more than 20 years.  Based on my experience preparing these assessments, here are four things you can do to build your IP portfolio in the next six months:

  1. Be sure you are identifying inventions and filing patent applications. More than 150,000 patent applications were filed during the first half of 2019 – how many did your company file?  If your answer is “Zero”, change that in the next six months.
  2. If you have hired new employees in the last six months, train those new hires on the importance of IP and teach them how to identify inventions.
  3. Smart organizations schedule regular brainstorming sessions and invention contests to create an innovation culture that produces a steady stream of new inventions. How many brainstorming sessions and invention contests did you conduct in the first half of 2019?  If your answer is “Zero”, add this to your list of key activities for the second half of the year.
  4. Schedule an “invention mining” session to analyze any new products (or product enhancements) released in the past 6-12 months. Look for any critical inventions in those products and take steps to protect the inventions.

Don’t spend another six months ignoring your valuable IP.

Failing to protect your IP in a timely manner may cause inventions to become freely available to your competitors.

Get started with at least one of the above activities this week so you have a stronger IP portfolio by the end of the year.

The four activities listed above are part of my 12-point Intellectual Property Assessment.  This assessment provides a comprehensive analysis of a company’s current IP situation and identifies problems to fix.  Based on the analysis, I map out an IP plan for the next 6-12 months that will expand the company’s IP assets.

If you are interested in learning more about an Intellectual Property Assessment for your organization, let’s schedule a time to talk.  Click Here to Contact Me.

 

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