With no budget constraints, unlimited time, a small set of IP data, and no other stakeholders to consider, the IP decision-making process would be a piece of cake!
However, this is not the reality for IP teams. Making great IP decisions for IP teams requires diving into vast amounts of data from various sources - legal, technical, and business information. IP portfolio managers attempt to navigate hundreds of data points to capture relevant insights and they need to do that quickly. This is an impossible task with data in separate disconnected systems spread across organizational silos.
IP is becoming increasingly integral to the business, which means decision-making processes are becoming even more complex because more people are involved. With limited time available to make key decisions, every minute counts.
Read on for five best practices learned through collaboration with the Anaqua Client Community and new capabilities being developed in the AQX® IP management platform. Many of the features discussed below will be available in AQX 11 and beyond. Let's dive into each best practice together:
To consistently make great decisions you need a decision framework. You want this framework to work in the big picture as well as at a granular level. For example, with a 3G portfolio, there is limited innovation, and many granted patents support monetization and litigation when needed. The bulk of your budget in this case will be for maintenance fees and licensing.
On the other hand, for a 6G portfolio, the shape is quite the reverse with strong innovation, many first filings, and few granted IP assets, litigation is unlikely, and licensing is on the horizon.
There is a tendency for the maintenance budget to cannibalize other budgets. A decision framework provides a disciplined approach to how you allocate resources and budgets.
What you can measure, you can manage. A decision framework helps you quantify IP objectives, such as the number of IP assets you want to create, maintain, and the budget and demonstrate the business impact. It is critical that your partners understand how you impact their organizations which helps you become a trusted business partner.
Anaqua is collaborating with clients to develop a new decision framework. At the beginning of each year when you meet with business partners to understand overall business objectives, you will have a framework for making decisions with and aligning objectives. This will help you steer innovation, align your portfolio, IP objectives and set goals to achieve those defined business objectives. This ensures your IP assets will continue to make a strong contribution to the business.
The next best practice is to ensure alignment of each IP asset to its corresponding product, market, and technology with the relevant business unit.
The value of an IP asset is directly tied to the business value it creates. When discussing IP strategy recently with the CIP of a large European chemical company, he said, "We have 40,000 patents supporting 20,000 products sold in 130 countries. It's impossible to have a single IP strategy for such a situation. Every asset aligns with its corresponding product, market, and revenue. That is how it becomes a simple decision. Is it a strategic market with a lot of revenue? Or a small market with a limited and declining revenue stream?"
Many of our clients are beginning to leverage multiple classifications to slice and dice their portfolio and have found that this is the most efficient for them to analyze and gain portfolio insights.
Pharmaceutical companies need to manage their IP in a drug product centric fashion to align their IP assets with products. By law, Japanese and German companies must manage remuneration to inventors. These companies calculate the compensation by associating patents and inventions to products to revenue. Achieving alignment between legal, product, and other business departments can be easier for these organizations.
To establish rationalized decision processes across your organization you need to consider three factors: What process do you follow? What data do you use? What questions do you need to answer?
The most challenging question for clients is the process because processes vary from one organization to the next, and within the same organization, attorneys make decisions in different ways.
You need to consider softer and technical drivers such as technical ranking, legal ranking, business ranking, citations, blocking citation, rejection. Those can be assigned weights with different factors to help decide.
Anaqua is collaborating with the Anaqua Client Community to develop decision support analytics. Stay tuned to learn more about these capabilities in the upcoming AQX 11 release.
You want the decisions you make to be data driven decisions. Understand the big picture and macro trends to understand what's happening in your industry, competitive landscape, down to the portfolio
family level. It is also important to study data from internal sources and related data from external analytics mined from PTOs, public data sources, etc.
Switching to the family or case level data by mining internal information helps you understand the history of reviews. "Why did people think this was an innovative idea? Because it doesn't make sense to me today, but perhaps five years ago, they really had something in mind?". And that knowledge often disappears from the company when people move on. Capturing historical information about business, legal, and technical ranking is valuable information.
Anaqua currently offers predictive analytics about the examiner through AcclaimIP. With predictive analytics you can better understand have your original claims diminished to just a small portion of the application.
With predictive analytics you can better understand what the examiner's past responses have been, and what can you expect from that examiner moving forward? The objective is to help you make better informed decisions.
Anaqua manages data for 153 million patents and is building our own trademark database. Anaqua vision is to mine billions of data points to selectively deliver nuggets of actionable intelligence at decision time to the decision maker. Anaqua is also strengthening prosecution analytics, so clients can better understand how claims have evolved over the course of a prosecution.
With "augmented intelligence," we want to offer decision makers access to great data tools to help make better informed decisions.
Anaqua plans to enable IP teams to make decisions faster with recommendations. The new recommendation tool will not make decisions for you but provides a recommendation to help an attorney or review committee by automatically processing multiple data points and business rules. For every IP decision there are multiple drivers, and that information can be automatically collected by your IP management software.
For example, a client wants to leverage recommendation for first filings. This client collects many data points, automatically processes questionnaires, and triggers surveys to the subject matter experts. The responses are collected and analyzed to make a first filing recommendation.
Similarly, a foreign filing strategy can be pre-drafted based on multiple data points. And we're working to comprehend external analytics like citations, blocking citations, etc. in making those patent recommendations. Once you have recommendations, you can organize your IP decisions in buckets; the "no-brainers" and the "head-scratchers."
Another new tool for pharmaceutical companies is the Exclusivity Optimization capability in AQX. As soon as you file for your first composition of matter patent, the clock starts ticking on the IP track. The market exclusivity tool will also indicate the best time to file your new drug application. You can manage the regulatory track and the IP track in parallel. This allows you to accelerate or decelerate the IP track to optimize the regulatory track to achieve the longest possible optimization period.
In conclusion, these five IP decision-making best practices learned in partnership with the Anaqua Client Community are here to assist you. Anaqua is actively addressing these challenges in the AQX IP management platform and leveraging AI to make the IP decision making process easier.
Interested in learning how to make IP portfolio decisions with AQX?
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