Making money from your intellectual property often brings to mind two things: creating innovative products that outsell competitors or selling the patents to someone else. Indeed, why hang onto IP that you don’t intend to use for your own products?
There is, in fact, another option for monetizing your intellectual property—a choice that doesn’t involve letting go of your hard-earned and expensive patents. You could license your technology to other companies, allowing the technology to be developed without losing control of the IP.
Is that an option you should consider? Well, there are several different factors at play. Let’s look at all the angles.
Identifying the Intellectual Property
Before you can identify the potential licensing options, you must first know each and every piece of intellectual property your company owns. If you’re an enterprise organization, you might have thousands of patents, many of which you’re maintaining without even using.
Identifying the patents you’re not using is easy enough, but what about any other information that patent could provide? You need to know the quality of the patent in question, the breadth and depth of the claims within, and how it applies to the current technology your company is developing.
Fortunately, IPVision can help with that. Our iScore patent analysis program takes care of thousands of patents in a matter of days, rather than the months of analysis that was once necessary. You don’t need to put off analysis anymore due to lack of man hours.
With a deeper understanding of the IP your company already owns, you’ll be one step closer to identifying licensing opportunities.
Seeking the Licensing Opportunities
It’s easy to think that companies will come knocking in order to license the intellectual property you own, especially if it’s something that could drastically improve current technology. The fact is, however, that your IP wouldn’t have been gathering dust in your files if companies were always on the lookout for possible licensing opportunities.
More likely, those companies seeking technology such as the IP you currently hold, well, they probably don’t know your IP exists. They may be working hard to create something similar, treading closely to infringing upon patents you’d nearly forgotten you had. What if you could save them the lawsuit and make money off your IP at the same time?
That’s where you’ll find these licensing opportunities. But how could you possibly know what other companies are working on? A glance at the landscape surrounding the patents you hold could give you an idea who else is working in that arena. You can also seek out information about individual companies’ patent holdings, which could give you a fuller image of the products they’re planning to develop.
Both of these options are also available with IPVision. Our patent landscaping technology is second-to-none, providing the most comprehensive information available regarding the patents surrounding any particular intellectual property. This, paired with our IPVision Advantage dashboard, gives the most complete picture available of the intellectual property being developed within your field.
With companies identified, you can then begin vetting for potential licensing options. You know they’re looking for the IP you hold, so all the guesswork is gone. Instead, you’re ready with intellectual property in hand and monetization opportunities on the horizon.
If you’d like to learn more about how IPVision could help you identify opportunities to license the IP your company currently holds, just give us a call.
