Managing and commercializing hundreds of patents in an unorganized portfolio can be a tough job. To maximize the value of your portfolio, it is essential to understand or rather visualize:
  1. What’s in your portfolio?
  2. What’s in your competitors for portfolio?
  3. Commercialization opportunities
Portfolio segmentation, using multiple predefined parameters, helps in visualization of core and non-core patents, to make strategic licensing decisions about selling or buying of patents. Some parameters used for patent ranking are:
  1. Number of independent claims
  2. Inventive scope
  3. Number of citations
  4. Number of inventors
  5. Number of family members
  6. Legal status
  7. Remaining life of the patents
  8. IPC classification coverage
  9. Products covered /Industrial applicability
  10. Licensing potential
Patent rankings help to identify strong patents having commercial value (or associated products). This in-turn can be used for licensing through infringement analysis i.e. companies illegally selling or using your patented invention. A database of potential infringers can be maintained for royalty earning purposes.
The non-core or unused patents can on other hand be licensed out to companies operating in the same technology domain. This helps in reducing the maintenance fee of the under-performing patents. Rather than abandoning your patents or letting them expire, licensing-out to companies developing around the same technology area is a smarter move.
To keep up the technology race, it is important to understand the value of your portfolio. Digging into your portfolio and comparing competitor and self portfolios provides insights about:
  1. Innovation and future trends of technology
  2. Gaps in your existing portfolio
  3. Technologies your competitors are pursuing
  4. Available opportunities for licensing
An organized portfolio can therefore drive crucial business decisions and can be worth millions of dollars.