The company world runs on goods. Profits and losses, revenue forecasts, and product offerings are all the lifeblood of a business and they’re all driven by products. It should come as no surprise, then, that you would want to protect your products with patented technologies — but it turns out there is much more to it than just protection.

With a patent to item mapping, you could begin assigning a accurate value to patents. With that improved capability you have a higher capacity to maximize the return on your intellectual property investment.

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That’s due to the fact you would have a far better understanding of which patents are your most valuable and which have extremely small value. If you could tie your patents to your products the actual assessment could be performed with greater accuracy and precision, which in turn could aid you:

• Understand whether or not or how much to prune your portfolio since you could tie it far more directly to your balance sheet

• Gain insight into new licensing opportunities

• Decide how to direct future R&ampD investments

• Improve your existing capability to manage safeguard and exploit your patents

You may well not have given it much thought, but prior to dismissing trademarks out of hand, contemplate how they are utilised. Trademarks are utilised to protect naming conventions as distinctive and proprietary to a business or individual. Trademarks are utilized for 1) company names, 2) services, three) slogans, four) designs and logos, and five) merchandise and brands.

Let’s say, for example, you are releasing a new item or brand and will be spending substantial capital promoting and marketing it. You want to trademark that product name to make certain brand value and differentiate your self from the competition.

You think that it is something you feel is inherently valuable, which is why you are providing it to the marketplace and why you want to safeguard it from being utilised by others with out your permission.

In fact, just as patents are technologies monopolies in the market, trademarks are product/branding monopolies. From this vantage point, trademarks are an intriguing approximation for products and brand names. With this understanding, the term product/brands can be thought of as a synonym for trademarks for this discussion.

By attempting to map patents to product/brands, you find a very targeted set of possibilities that enable an understanding of the relationships between intellectual property patents and the item/brands they protect.

Now that we have a patents-to-trademarks linkage there are a number of use instances that are ground breaking and innovative:

• Searching for disconnections between brand protection and Intellectual Property Protection. That is, how nicely are your items/brands protected by patents?

• How do I understand what patents I can leverage to protect my merchandise?

• If I have key patent technologies, what outside products/brands may well result in patent infringement (e.g. not owned by the very same company, branded following the date of the patent, exact same semantic space, etc)?

• What patents might I be infringing on in diverse product arenas (Freedom to Operate)?

• How do I compare two companies’ patent and item positions?

• How do I know where a new patent might be applied to a product?

An understanding of how items are related to patented technologies can support you safeguard, defend and exploit a a lot higher segment of your intellectual property. We’re no longer talking about only patents, which is the present mindset in the market. I personally believe this represents a alter in how people view their IP — that it will foster a more integrated view of IP and its company value.