Abstract
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.
This chapter is based on an earlier publication in Drug Discovery Today.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Davis JS, Harrison SS (2001) Edison in the boardroom: how leading companies realize value from their intellectual assets. Wiley, New York
Smith M, Hansen F (2002) Managing intellectual property: a strategic point of view. J Intell Cap 3(4):366–374
Thumm N (2001) Management of intellectual property rights in European biotechnology firms. Technol Forecast Soc Change 67(2–3):259–272
WIPO (2011) Statistics on patents, trademarks, and industrial designs. http://www.wipo.int/ipstats/en/statistics/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bader, M.A., Gassmann, O., Ziegler, N. (2014). Managing the Intellectual Property Portfolio. In: Gassmann, O., Schweitzer, F. (eds) Management of the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01056-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01056-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01055-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01056-4
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsBusiness and Management (R0)