The strength of your company’s IP portfolio can help convince investors and potential collaborators that your company is managed and staffed appropriately to succeed in profitably commercializing its innovations, thereby encouraging favorable investments and business collaborations.
Strong IP portfolios can attract a variety of interested parties, such as:
Investors who are considering:
- Funding a start-up company;
- Financing an existing IP-based business;
- Accepting a security interest in IP;
- Entering a joint venture with an IP-based partner; and/or
- Underwriting a public offering of an IP-based company.
Buyers who are contemplating:
- Acquiring IP and/or IP-based assets;
- Acquiring an IP-based manufacturing or service organization; and/or
- Purchasing a license to make, use, and/or sell an IP-based product or process.
Of course, many approached targets will want to find a way to lower their cost of doing business with your company. For example, to gain leverage, a target might attack perceived weaknesses in your company’s IP. Rather than being blind-sided by such attacks, the better approach is to prepare for them, and neutralize them as much as possible well beforehand.
This practice suggests carefully auditing any IP a potential target might find interesting, and honestly assessing its scope, limitations, and vulnerabilities, from both a technical, legal, and business perspective.
To be even better prepared to show how your company’s IP is the best solution to fulfilling the target’s needs, also consider the potential target’s alternatives to doing business with your company, and the strengths and weaknesses of those alternatives, perhaps even innovating further solutions (and protecting the resulting IP) in a manner that eliminates any advantages of those alternatives.