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Portfolio Management: Locating, Organizing, and Communicating Patent Information
Patent portfolio managers face a number of logistical challenges in developing, analyzing and deploying their organizations' patent assets. First, they need to be able to define the scope and content of portfolios under management or review. Second, they need to be able to organize and store information about those portfolios in a way that is repeatable, durable, and accessible. Finally, they need to be able to aggregate and communicate that information to drive budgeting, reporting, and strategy development.
The logistics of identifying, organizing, and communicating patent information are complicated because:
- Patents are unique. Every patent and every claim of every patent is different, so abstractions, summaries, and generalizations run the risk of missing or obscuring the true value of any given patent asset.
- Patents are prolific. There are millions of patents currently in force and more than 150,000 new patents are granted annually in the United States alone; many organizations are managing patent portfolios of hundreds to tens-of-thousands, as well as monitoring competitor portfolios.
- Patent knowledge is expensive. Highly trained legal, technical, and business experts are required to find and extract useful information from patent documents and their supporting contexts.
- Patent and business management resources are in short supply. The patent function of most organizations is lean, lacks the best tools, and receives little (or negative) attention from senior management, which regards patents as an arcane cost center and source of business uncertainty.
The central tension in managing large patent portfolios is that a single claim of a single patent ultimately decides an infringement suit, but numerous patents with numerous claims must be aggregated for product protection and licensing. Deep information about a patent, its claims, its technical context, and its applicability to the market is expensive to acquire. That information can also be very difficult to maintain as it grows and changes over time. Many organizations lose track of the patents they own, the reasons they were gotten in the first place, and the ways they could be applied to today's business challenges. Their portfolios and those of their competitors are just too big to be managed on a claim-by-claim basis, and they have no way to know what information is worth tracking for future use. Patent management is done on an ad hoc basis as the cost of acquiring information (often for the second time) can be balanced against a clear and present business need.
More efficient patent management techniques exist for those willing to focus on several key principles for improving the logistics of using patent information:
- Process is key. Having a repeatable process is the only way to pursue improvement, maintain consistency, and build enduring competencies within the organization that can survive business and staffing changes.
- Be proactive. Patent management functions have a tendency to be reactive, always chasing the latest product launch, reviewing the deal that should have closed yesterday, and addressing issues with customers, partners, and competitors that have already become problems; this cycle can be hard to break, but it must be broken in order to effectively manage a large patent portfolio.
- Build for the future. Always be aware of how knowledge gained can be stored, retrieved, and repurposed for future challenges; a cardinal sin of patent management is spending vast resources on analyses and opinions that are used once and never again. (Even the most situation-specific analysis will invariably contain components and learnings that can be reused.)
- Seek the best tools. Patent management is difficult, but many general productivity tools are readily available and adaptable to patent management tasks (eg, spreadsheets, databases, project management software, collaboration systems, etc.); specialized patent tools and experts that can help apply them are constantly improving as well.
- Engage the business managers. Communication with senior management, business unit leaders, and other customers of the patent function should be front-and-center when managing a portfolio; the knowledge gained by patent managers is only useful to the degree it can be reported to and understood by business leaders to drive decision making and resource allocation.
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