Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Welcome to the April edition of the Perception Partners IP Advantage newsletter. In this issue we discuss matters of intellectual property (IP) value and valuation, an area of concern to all investors in innovation. We believe the key driver of IP value is quality, which we interpret as the attention paid by participants in the IP process: i.e. those people engaged in invention, prosecution, and exploitation. In this newsletter, we hope you will pay attention to the quality of our words and works. We welcome your feedback and any suggestions for future topics. Sincere thanks, Barry Brager Managing Partner Perception Partners |
Perception Partners Speaking Schedule
2008 Speaking Topics Focus on IP Value & Valuation
Throughout spring, Managing Partner Barry Brager will showcase Perception Partners' discovery tools, analytics, and business insights. Please participate if you are attending any of these informative professional events.
|
|
Please contact us to set up times to meet at any of these events. |
The Secret of Patent Valuation - Focus on Risks First
|
By first assessing the risks inherent in patents - before focusing on value - you can reduce your total IP valuation and negotiation costs
When valuing patents, experts often spend significant time using multiple approaches and complex assumptions to estimate the value of patent portfolios. Diving into valuation too early can add substantial cost to your technology investment, business development and IP exploitation efforts.
Since patents are ultimately worth what a willing buyer will pay, wouldn't it be ideal if you could identify risks to patents first, since risks are the basis of most buyer discounts on value?
At Perception Partners, we do not perform "upside" valuation until we have identified threats to claim or patent integrity. We find it is more appropriate to the needs of our clients to begin by assessing the risks to any patents before understanding value. This approach allows us to dismiss a significant number of likely invalid, undetectable, incremental or commercially unattractive claims that might otherwise have been subjected to time consuming and expensive analysis.
Patents must overcome the following basic risks:
In our experience, assessing risk is a qualitative and a quantitative process. Below we describe how we approach risk assessment as the precursor to an effective, actionable patent valuation.
|
| Measuring Patent Risk
|
By scoring patent risks across Business, Technology and Legal factors, potential discounts on value can be appreciated early in the valuation process
Perception Partners scores and weights Business, Technology and Legal factors to create a Risk Matrix and effectively estimate a risk discount for patent valuation. This approach allows us to quickly determine hindrances to maximizing value, and further helps us identify which issues might arise in any subsequent negotiation. This practice also helps to anticipate delays in transactions as well reduce costs and timelines for our clients.
The Risk Matrix below is from the perspective of the IP owner: the most valuable patents have low Business, Technology and Legal risks, therefore an external party should appreciate a higher valuation.
Our "risk first, value next" process has proven effective when assessing and negotiating portfolios for patent buyers and sellers. Please contact us to learn more about the Perception Partners Risk Matrix approach to lower cost, more persuasive patent valuation.
|
|
Perception Partners provides strategic insights that inform better business decisions about leveraging innovation. Our team of experts assists in matters of technology investment, business development and IP exploitation. Our clients gain greater certainty about IP value and risk in user-friendly analytic reports that can be quickly read and understood.
Perception is the intellectual component of value. Please engage us to improve the perception of the IP assets in your portfolio today. |
|
|
Hot IP Value Tip: Finding Buyers or Licensees or for Your Patents
|
You may be familiar with using forward citations to find potential licensees reliant on your technology.
However, other methods are quite effective, and can be used in concert with existing approaches.
OPTION 1
Look for top assignees of conceptually similar patents, using a latent semantic or relevance-based
search tool
OPTION 2
Look for top assignees of technologically similar patents by comparing IPC code patterns across documents.
OPTION 3
Look for top assignees with fast growth rates in the past 3 years in the inventive IPC-R of your key patents.
Great results could be found seconds after you look!
|
|
|
