4 Tips For Managing Your Business Patents
In the modern global economy, some businesses have begun to question the value of patents. However, many businesses still live or die by their ability to protect their intellectual property.
Regardless of how important they are to your business, here are four tips for managing your patents better.
Prioritize Your Patents
For some businesses, their patents are absolutely essential to their survival. Failing to patent key concepts and creations or failing to enforce the patents that you hold can prove fatal for your business. The only way to ensure that your patents are protected and that you are able to gain maximum value from them is to make them a priority for your business.
That means that you need to be prepared to make the necessary investments in people who can help you to formalize, file, and protect your patents. You also need procedures in place to instantly identify the need for a patent and to ensure that your patents are not being infringed upon.
Get A Patent Lawyer
Depending on the size of your business and the scope of what your business does, you might want to keep a lawyer on retainer so that you have access to their services whenever you need them. But regardless of the size of your business, it is worth making contact with a patent lawyer and getting to know them and what they can do for you.
Look for a law firm that has experience with or specializes exclusively in patent law. Your patents are far too valuable to your business for you to be lax with keeping them secure. Investing in a qualified patent lawyer is a worthwhile investment in the security of the patents that you own.
Identify The Need For A Patent Early
The role that patents have to play in a business will depend entirely upon the specific details of what that business is and what it does. Whether patents are a routine part of your day to day operations or they are something that you only occasionally deal with, you need to be able to identify the need to file a patent as soon as it arises. This is especially important for businesses who are in a race with their rivals to make new advances and patent them as soon as possible.
Exploit Your Patents As Much As You Can
Once you have a patent in place, you should then formulate plans for leveraging its value as an asset. Businesses that are actively pursuing new lines of research with the intention of making new marketable discoveries are often disappointed by the ultimate results of their research – it is in the nature of research that things do not always go your way.
However, just because research doesn’t go the way that you expect, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any scope for monetizing these patents. If you can find these other uses, you might be able to make more money than you otherwise would have from your patent, despite being disappointed by your research.
Enforcing your business’s patents is essential if you want to be able to reliably monetize them. Businesses that don’t protect or even file their patents are simply throwing money away.