Managing the Intellectual Property Portfolio

Management of intellectual property has increasingly been recognized as a powerful instrument of corporate strategy and a main source of competitive advantage. Patents have become ever more important for firms in order to protect technologies from imitation, achieve a stronger position in global markets, strengthen the firm's technological leadership, and enable the trading of intellectual assets. A company's patent strategy should be derived from corporate strategy and intend to both help generate new business potential and secure existing and realized potential. To this end, successful patent management follows technology management, since it is strongly linked to the life cycle of technologies. Five distinctive phases reflect the activities of patent life cycle management. While in the first two phases, explore and generate, the firm accumulates new competences about a new technology, these competences remain at a high level in the protect and optimize phases. This is true even for the decline phase, although here, the firm may decide to discard the patent.