Patent management in the 21st century

Ruud Peters and Severin de Wit

Chapter 1 in A Modern Guide to Patents, 2025, pp 20-48 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Companies undertake significant efforts and spend substantial costs on building and maintaining their patent portfolios. IP departments know that the patent strategy needs to be fully aligned with the business strategy. Although a majority of companies claim to implement this alignment, when one scratches the surface, this alignment is much weaker than expected. Most business strategy documents do not contain patent strategy information, and many IP departments do not have access to business strategy documents. This low involvement of IP departments in the business strategy and vice versa means that patent portfolio management in many companies is based on the number of historic filings for R&D groups and their portfolio budgets. The portfolios built in this way are generally only activated when a competitor copies patented features of a product or service without authorization or when the company is accused of infringing a competitor's patents. Building and using a patent portfolio in this way can sub-optimally support a business in realizing its business strategy. This chapter describes a proactive and granular approach to patent portfolio management to create control positions in the market, which can be leveraged to generate sustainable advantages for businesses. This approach requires each business to follow a structured process involving senior people from the business, R&D, design, and IP departments, who have a good view of where the markets, industry, technology, and their own business will be going in the future. For each of these businesses, a patent strategy has to be defined that not only supports the business strategy but is integrated into a wider multi-mode IP strategy, where the different forms of IP are considered together to support a business. This will become increasingly relevant to companies operating in digital markets.

Keywords: Patent portfolio management; Patent strategy; Business strategy; Generation of value for business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035308590
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