Contributing IP rights to a research or business venture with another party again follows the process outlined above in the licensing-out section. Since the other party will be contributing one or more complementary business assets in lieu of only monetary payments, these deals are more complicated to construct. The variation from the licensing [...]
All the above background work and analysis prepares a company for licensing out its portfolio. However a question remains as to the negotiation value of any individual patent. Is the portfolio worth more separately or all together? To gain insight at the individual patent level, several software companies have engaged in creating patent [...]
Citation Relationship Maps Show Optimum Portfolio Cross-Licensing Options Citation Relationship Maps show optimum portfolio Cross-Licensing Options. Potential licensor and licensee IP sets are mapped to show inter-relationships that help negotiation teams identify the best strategy for their business.
Citation Maps Also Assist in Locating Licensing Opportunities Citation maps also assist in locating licensing opportunities. In addition to portfolio measures, visualization techniques based on individual patents also help identify potential licensees and illustrate their needs. An example of a citation tree is shown to illustrate how a client’s patent is being cited [...]
Identification of Licensing Opportunities One means to identify potential licensing opportunities is to look at the total number of citations of the company’s patent portfolio by other entities. The “Identification of Licensing Opportunities” figure shows how many times other entities cited a particular company’s portfolio. Potential licensees might thus be not only the [...]
Market Coverage Measures To obtain a good return on patent licensing, it is helpful to be able to license the technology in the major commercial markets of the world. In the “Market Coverage Measures” figure, we see the markets that are covered by patents in this portfolio. In this case, there are over [...]
Technical Strength and Business Utility Measures Here the individual axes rely heavily on citation counts, reference counts, and examiner codes. Looking at the pattern in this figure, there are no exceptional attributes. However, there are over a half dozen attributes in the B+ range. This is important for negotiation. The sports analogy is [...]
Validity and Enforceability Measures Scores derived from the company’s portfolio and the portfolios of other comparison patents (each from specific assignees) are ranked between zero and the maximal value on any one axis of a radar diagram. There are times when the average value is quite low compared to the maximal, and other [...]
Understanding Exceptional Performance In addition to comparing a company’s portfolio to be licensed-out to other portfolios, statistical measures of value can also be applied. The teachings of Edward Deming and the Quality movement are very helpful here. The “average plus three standard deviations” was often set as a limit to discern when a [...]
When preparing for negotiations, it is important to understand which patent attributes are likely to play a central role in the negotiations, versus other attributes that are not a point of distinction or value. Several entities have engaged in creating patent scores, patent strength, and patent rating algorithms that apply a single value [...]
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