IP management systems: Knowledge is power

Minesoft’s Caitlin Kavanagh recently had an article published with well-known intellectual property (IP) magazine, IPPro. Kavanagh explained how IP knowledge management or patent portfolio management tools can be implemented to improve IP awareness throughout a corporation, from the launch of a product to the beginning of a new project.

By ignoring and/or undervaluing intellectual property, businesses can be driven into risky situations, such as opening up your company to patent infringement proceedings which could result in further loss of profits and harm your long-term corporate survivability, or the possibility of competitors taking advantage of your own technological innovations. In essence, IP research and analysis further upstream can help in increasing the grant success rate, decreasing pendency and avoiding wasteful legal and research and development expenditure. Many companies incorporating best practices with respect to patent management have a net positive outcome with significant return on investment upon frameworks and tools to support such best practices.

IP management systems as a tool to spread IP awareness from the top down

Finding a way to communicate the importance of intellectual property to the executive branch is a good starting point of an IP awareness strategy, as with their approval IP or patent departments can more easily get buy-in for IP integration into key strategies and day-to-day processes.

This is often done by establishing a monthly forum to give management teams the opportunity to discuss IP-related banners—for example, studying patent literature as a source of competitive intelligence, identified competitor action, as foreshadowed by newly published patents, can be used to inform future offensive or defensive strategy, to counter emerging threats or capitalise on opportunities to outmanoeuvre competitors.

Monthly IP meetings between department heads from research and development, legal, IP and the c-suite are no longer enough to educate on the value of IP companywide. In these situations, having effective IP knowledge management or patent portfolio management tools can be beneficial, to incorporate internal company workflows and custom taxonomies to help manage patent data globally throughout the organisation. Those diving in are faced with challenges of volume and accessibility, but perseverance and employment of specialist databases and advanced workflow systems, such as Minesoft’s Pat-KM, that automate many of the processes will pay off in terms of the wealth of insights gained.

For more information about implementing an effective knowledge management system, read the full article here.