Across industries, IP professionals face a recurring challenge — being perceived primarily as a cost center or administrative function. Yet, in today’s innovation-driven economy, intellectual property has the potential to be one of a company’s strongest strategic assets. In this webinar, experts from the Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) and LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions explore how IP teams can reshape this narrative and raise awareness of their impact both internally and externally.
Joining the discussion are Dr. Bowman Heiden, Co-Director of CIP at the University of Gothenburg, and Ruud Peters, Co-Director of CIP at the University of Gothenburg and former Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Philips and long-time advocate for integrating IP strategy into corporate decision-making. Together, they share real-world examples of how effective communication, cross-functional collaboration, and the use of patent analytics can elevate the IP function to a position of influence and leadership.
Join us to discover how you can turn your IP department into a strategic catalyst that drives innovation, growth, and organizational alignment.
Co-Director of CIP, University of Gothenburg
Co-Director of CIP, University of Gothenburg & Former Chief Intellectual Property Officer, Philips
Head of IP, LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions
Marco Richter: Indeed, we often observe a close correlation between LexisNexis patent quality metrics and indicators of IP-driven economic value. While there is always a middle layer between a patented invention and the commercial value it ultimately generates, the Patent Asset Index aligns very well with how effectively an organization can execute, scale, and monetize its innovations.
A clear illustration of this middle layer comes from early 2020. As the pandemic emerged, we analyzed the portfolio impact of companies working on mRNA technologies using the Patent Asset Index. This enabled us to identify all the players that ultimately brought mRNA vaccines to market. At the same time, the analysis also surfaced companies with highly impactful mRNA portfolios that did not obtain regulatory approval. This shows that strong IP is a necessary foundation, but commercial success still depends on execution, timing, and external factors.
A great example of excluding that middle layer is looking at a company whose entire business model is based on licensing patents: InterDigital. Here, the connection between patent quality and revenue becomes particularly visible because patents themselves are the product.
When examining InterDigital’s Patent Asset Index, portfolio size, and revenue over time, the correlation between Patent Asset Index and revenue is strikingly clear. As the Patent Asset Index rises, revenue follows closely. (Note that revenue spikes are often caused by catch-up payments for previous years.) This strong alignment shows that the qualitative impact of the portfolio, exactly what the Patent Asset Index measures, has a direct relationship to monetization outcomes.
In contrast, there seems to be no direct connection between the pure size of the patent portfolio and InterDigital’s ability to generate revenues. In other words, looking at raw patent counts, whether increasing or declining, appears disconnected from true economic return. This demonstrates that it is not the number of patents that drives value, but their impact and relevance in the market.
Marco Richter: Sure, LexisNexis PatentSight+ allows you to integrate financial data with patents.Using Custom Fields, you can import and map both text and numeric information, including financial metrics such as licensing revenue, R&D expenses, or prosecution costs, directly to patent families. These values can then be viewed in charts, tables, and analyses alongside our standard indicators.
Ruud Peters: Several conditions need (at least) to be fullfilled to sustain a value driven IP department/function:
All value-driven IP processes (strategy, implementation, reporting, etc.) need to be embedded across the entire company at all levels, from the board and senior business management down to the operational levels in R&D, business, and other functions.
IP leadership must ensure structured education programs are established to train all IP staff in value-driven IP management.
IP leadership must maintain close relationships and open communication channels with senior management and the board to stay informed about internal company activities, continuously educate new personnel at this level, who join the company coming from other companies with different IP cultures, and to maintain a network of external relationships to stay updated on developments in other companies.
IP leadership needs to develop and prepare successors for their new role to ensure that they continue the never-ending journey of developing new organizations and business models to be able to drive IP-business value in a continuously changing environment inside and outside their companies.
Ruud Peters: For developing, introducing, and maintaining IP value-driven approaches that are consistently applied across different business units, it is preferred to handle and develop the required capabilities centrally. However, close co-operation with the business units is essential, as you will need their support (including sales information) and agreement on the contribution IP makes to their business.
My recommendation is that IP departments develop the capabilities to perform IP valuations in-house. The same IP valuation methods can be applied to both potential and captured value. IP departments should know their IP portfolios best to identify pockets of potential value and understand which IP transactions (I use this term very broadly) they made that captured value from this portfolio. You can apply the 80/20 rule if you make many IP transactions. This is an ongoing process that enables IP departments to monitor the value they have captured and project potential value they might capture in the future.
Ruud Peters: If a business is operating in the exclusivity model and you have built an IP portfolio to support that, but turns-out not to stop others because they are designing around, the IP portfolio has simply failed to fullfil its purpose. If, however, others avoid entering that space, the IP portfolio has just done what it was supposed to do: maintain exclusivity. This should translate into additional business value.
Similarly, if you have built a defensive IP portfolio, and others have not asserted any IP against your company, you may assume that this portfolio has served its purpose. This translates into lower costs for your business. If they asserted IP against your company and you were unable to mitigate part or whole of the royalty or other demand, the defensive portfolio did not provide a proper defense. In that case, you need to review how you build and manage your portfolio.
At CIP we have the BIP (Business in IP) program, where we educate and train people in how to apply the IP value models and related IP valuation methods on multiple business cases. For more information about this program (and other programs), see the CIP website https://cip-net.com.
