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?

This week, Nissan applies for patents on self-driving vehicles and the resignation of the Director of the USPTO remains shrouded in mystery.

There’s a battle brewing over patents for “Covfefe” and Amazon looks to block online price checking in the latest patent news.

Shushing the whispers that Apple had reached the end of its innovative streak, the company was granted 54 patents yesterday, June 20. These patents cover a wide range of products, both currently available and possible for the future. The applications for these patents were filed up to three years ago, with all approved and published in one day.

Patenting your inventions and ideas is a smart move. It allows you to capitalize on unexpected trends in your industry and gain exclusive rights to your designs for a set period of time (assuming you stay up-to-date on your patent fees).

On Thursday, June 12, IPVision co-founder and president Joseph Hadzima will address the 2017 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winners for innovation. The winners were announced in April of this year and include some of the brightest minds in various fields of study and invention.

In a move that combines Back to the Future-style wearable tech and the faux-kindness of Mean Girls, Microsoft plans to bring us glasses that tell us all about the nutrition stats in the food we’re planning to eat.

Ford is obviously on an innovation kick, as their record number of patents in 2016 will show. In fact, their total of 1,442 puts them well ahead of any other automaker filing for US patents in 2016. The 25% increase in patent filings over 2015 give a clear indication that the car company is trying to move forward, but are all the patents they’ve filed for or received really helpful?

Cambridge-based MIT has become nearly synonymous with innovation, and for good reason. This year, for the fourth year in a row, Massachusetts Institute of Technology was once again the number-two university in the list of top 100 worldwide universities granted US patents in 2016.

Whether your company is currently on top of the world or working its way there, you know there is always a competitor nipping at your heels. You may already know who that competitor is, or there may be a complete unknown preparing to disrupt your market. You could continue running without any idea how close your competitor is to overtaking you, or you could develop competitive intelligence through the use of patent analysis.