Management of your intellectual assets begins when you have the idea and continues for the life of your business. Your assets include: confidential information, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and perhaps patents. Each of these needs to be managed in order to build and maintain value as intangible assets.
Patents are particularly expensive. To get the best return on your investment research can assist you with making decisions related to:
-Filing patent applications
-Countries selections
-Prosecution
-Maintenance
-Portfolios
-Acquisitions
-Licensing
Research will make difficult decisions easier. In the innovation process the business, technology and legal teams interact to ensure that benchmarks are met at each stage of development. The blue boxes represent the intellectual property activities that accompany each stage.
Today’s company owner or innovation manager needs to have an intellectual property strategy at every phase of innovation development.
