Unless you are in a shipwreck on a remote island in the South Pacific, you may already realize that there has been a global recession in our hands. Although no one really knows how long it will last, everyone can prove that this has affected the fairly comfortable state of "business as usual". We have seen many companies in many industries are making predictable budget cuts and layoffs.
Intellectual property departments and the ports they manage are often seen as legal fees and are often the goal of corporate cost-cutting measures. During the economic downturn, they were asked to contribute more to the company's interests. While it is easy for the corporate finance department to arbitrarily allocate 20% of the budget cuts, it is not always easy for the IP sector to implement these cuts. Does the cut come from blocking the expiration of certain patents? What if they are the core of the company's revenue source? Should the reduction come from applying for fewer patents? What impact will these reductions have on the company's future competitiveness? Cost savings can be realized, and companies can strategically manage their IP ports at the same time. Make them more efficient in the short term without sacrificing competitive advantage over the long term.
In times of economic hardship, the IP sector caches between rock and tough places: demanding a reduction in spending [reducing the budget by 20%] while ensuring that future revenue streams are protected [preferably not letting anything go missing]. The "rock and hard" analogy may not be harsh enough. A more applicable analogy is the one sentenced: on the one hand, the need to reduce spending is pushing. On the other hand, the need to protect the company's business strategy and future sources of income is squeezing the opposite direction. There is constant pressure. The impact of the recession is to impose some additional distortions on bad habits and squeeze the intellectual property sector more difficult.
You can do both at the same time: reduce costs [and increase efficiency] and be strategic to your intellectual property portfolio. In fact, some studies point to the potential to reduce intellectual property costs while freezing resources to focus on more strategic intellectual property issues.
Past lesson
When companies get efficiency from CRM solutions, they don't focus on reducing costs and sacrificing valuable customers. They have adopted a strategic approach that includes increased efficiency and savings. For example, they use this exercise as an opportunity to focus the appropriate resources on the most valuable customers and consciously determine that other non-core or non-profit customers can give up.
Intellectual property management should be handled in a similar manner. The IP sector should increase efficiency and reduce costs, but not at the expense of the competitive advantage of its business from its intellectual property portfolio.
Reduce costs associated with intellectual property: from
Simplify communication with external law firms, inform a large number of time-based billing items related to administrative costs and communication, and prioritize invention disclosure so that only the most important inventions evolve into patent applications in order to invalidate unused patents.
higher efficiency: from
Automate more repetitive tasks and workflows, save more files electronically in a database of IP management solutions so that people who need them can easily access them. Unleash your employees and focus on more value-added activities, such as mapping patents to products, business units, technical departments, and more.
More strategic: from
Analyze the results of your portfolio mapping, relative relative strengths and weaknesses, rate and rank patents through relevant business segments, and analyze competitive IP ports based on the company's development plan to set and measure progress in relation to patent production targets. Patent the strategic advantage of your market.
It has recently been said that no company can save its way to success. Successful companies invest in growth. They invest in innovation. They invest in business processes and infrastructure and invest in employees. Companies investing in intellectual property and their ability to strategically manage IP ports will benefit from short-term cost savings and long-term competitive advantage.
Orignal From: Intellectual property management and budget cuts - own your cake and eat it too!
No comments:
Post a Comment