Value and Intangibles – the Value Problem

First, Page Seager IP wishes everyone all the best for the new year, no doubt a year of new milestones and challenges in the world of strategic IP.

We have a number of topics planned for the coming months.   Many of these will address IP issues that we are encountering in the world of information technology.   Before we do that, however, we thought we’d spend some time in January looking at some broader questions affecting the world of strategic IP.

This is the first of a number of posts that will explore a difficult question.   How does one allocate value to intellectual assets?   Intellectual asset managers around the world have been seeking a satisfactory answer to this question for some time – it is something of the Holy Grail in the world of managing intangibles.   If a firm, objective indicator of value could be applied to most IP portfolios (many of which consist of intellectual assets that are a work in progress), this would revolutionise the intellectual manager’s role.   At the very least, the task of convincing boards, potential investors and other stakeholders to commit themselves would be far less of a challenge.

IP Ownership - is it really all that it's cracked up to be?

When negotiating a collaboration agreement, one of the issues that often causes a headache is who is to own the IP.   In many cases, it is a debate that doesn’t need to happen.  As we saw a couple of weeks ago, this issue can be so divisive that the negotiating parties lose perspective and fall into the joint ownership trap.

Deadwood

Recently, we looked at the IP tracking issues that intellectual asset managers have to deal with in our post on Tracking Innovation.
One of the other problems that these managers face is how to deal with IP assets that their enterprise is unlikely to use. Once obtained, patents can cost a significant amount to maintain. If they are left to fester in an IP asset portfolio, the liability to an enterprise can continue to mount with no return for the investment.

The Joint Ownership Trap

Parties contemplating a collaboration will often enter heated negotiations about who is to own future IP. To resolve the deadlock, they sometimes adopt a halfway position that results in "joint ownership" of newly developed IP. This can result in several problems.

Tracking Innovation

One of the questions we like to ask IP Asset Managers is what sort of system they have in place to help them with their job.   Is it a reactive system?   Do they rely on their innovators to disclose what is being created, or do they have a more proactive system that tracks innovation from the outset?