Bad Economy Benefits your IP portfolio
Bolster you IP Portfolio by taking advantage of a stressed economy. This is simply the buy low sell high principle and any technology company that wants to securely plant their foundation in their technology market, needs to be fully aware of the opportunities that a down-sizing, cost-cutting, budget-straining economy provides.
If this is the last paragraph you read, then at least read this twice. It is a simple principle but in an econopanic, only the wise IP strategist capitalizes on this principle. Here is the principle: Patents and other IP increase the net worth of your company – no if, ands or buts. The cheaper you can obtain IP, the greater the net worth increase. And, since technology lawyers are not immune to being impacted by a bad economy – try something new for a change – take advantage of the hungry lawyers.
Less work for the lawyers means, greater willingness to reduce fees, work at lower fixed-price arrangements, or simply give more bang for the buck. No brainer income generation from mediocre patent is $30K. Well written patents for actual novel inventions easily bring in quite a bit more. There is a reason why patent attorneys have some of the highest malpractice insurance. Patents are worth a lot of money and if a patent attorney screws up, the damages can be quite high.
Scrutinize your R&D
You pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop great technology, why not spend a few more thousand to make sure it is protected – especially when dollars are cheap?
Your company pays significantly for its R&D efforts. Not all of what your think-tank comes up with actually gets implemented into your product lines. Once management, marketing, quality and control, etc. get hold of the functional spec, stuff just gets lopped off. What is the result? You paid top dollar for some smart folks to invent some novel solutions and, the inventions are tossed in the can because for today, they may be too expensive, too big, too slow, too complicated, too whatever. But, you should remember that tomorrow Intel will come out with another chip because, that is what they do. Hard drives get bigger, RAM gets cheaper, plastics get lighter, and before long, those tossed away inventions are doable. And in fact, your competitor just came out with a new product that includes them. Ouch, would have been great to have spent a few thousand dollars to file a patent on that awesome idea that you already spent tens of thousands on developing. If you had, it may be able to turn into hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Incentivize your engineers
Hard times can be exploited to geneate great motivation in your engineers if the payoff potential is there.
During a bad economy, everyone gets a little nervous. That savings account does not look as cushy as it once did and your engineers are probably hoping to find a little bit more income. This is a great time to offer incentive awards to motivate your engineers to come up with some great patentable or other IP related ideas. Make sure you implement a program that protects you from bogus ideas extracting valuable funds but, implement a program. Desperate times cause for desperate measures and, an engineer needing a bit more cash will be much more likely to stay up at night writing up an invention disclosure if there is an expectation of a bit of a windfall. I have developed tons of IP incentive programs for companies and you can easily devise them in such a way to generate a great flow of ideas without having to blindly payout big bucks. Believe me, your engineers are buying lottery tickets when the numbers get high – they will do the same with submitting patent disclosures.
Expand your view – don’t just focus on your product line
A lot of IP is tossed away because a tech company does not see it benefiting their product line. These are great IP assets to sell or license.
As I said in the previous section, you have paid quite a bit to develop technology, why not spend a few thousand more to try and recoup some of those costs. The problem with paying top dollar to have very smart people working for you is that they keep coming up with great ideas. Many times, these ideas are not related to you main product line and so, they are just tossed out. However, these are the ideas that can generally generate significant value and revenue. Take for example the young line man working for Georgia power that came up with an idea to keep squirrels off of the power lines. Certainly not a core product for a power generation and delivery company but, someone was smart and said “lets protect it”. They did, a patent was obtained and that idea generated significant revenue for the company.
If you need some consulting tips more specific to your company, give us a call at (404) 643-3430.
