In today’s innovation-driven economy, optimising or rightsizing a patent portfolio is a priority for businesses to ensure their competitive advantages are protected through IP while reducing maintenance cost to maximise ROI.

 

 

What is Patent Portfolio Pruning?

Patent Portfolio Pruning is the process of strategically abandoning lower-value patent assets to enable companies to reduce unnecessary renewal cost while providing additional budget to refresh the portfolio through potential filing of new applications covering new inventions which are potentially more speculative or disruptive. Reviewing a portfolio to identify candidates for abandonment can also highlight high quality assets relevant to the industry but not aligned to the business which could provide value extraction opportunities through patent sale or licensing.

 

What are the benefits from Patent Pruning?

The benefits from a Patent Portfolio Pruning assignment are to:

  • reduce the patent maintenance cost leading potentially to
  • redirect financial resources towards patents that deliver strategic, commercial of defensive value and potentially to
  • generate income from monetisation.

 

 

What is Dehns IP Consulting’s Patent Portfolio Pruning methodology?

 

Dehns IP Consulting works with clients to facilitate an efficient and objective filtering process to identify potential candidates for abandonment or sale / licensing.

Each Patent Portfolio Pruning project starts by agreeing the portion of the portfolio to review, e.g. assets relevant to a specific Business Unit, a geography, assets to be renewed in the next 12 months, cost reduction target, etc.

Dehns IP Consulting Patent Portfolio Pruning methodology follows a 6- stage process:

  1. Data collection & portfolio inventory
  2. Portfolio cost analysis & triage
  3. Patent scoring
  4. Pruning decision gate
  5. Quantify savings per scenario
  6. Approval

 

 

What’s Dehns’ differentiator in providing a Patent Portfolio Pruning service?

 

Dehns IP Consulting team provides a data-led Patent Portfolio Pruning process which can be supported by Dehns patent attorneys who have legal and technical expertise to provide patent scoring for aspects such as ease of design around or infringement detectability

Our consulting team has experience in identifying potential value extraction opportunities through patent sale or licensing among the candidates for abandonment.

Dehns Consulting helps the client’s IP team quantify annual and cumulative savings based on several pruning scenarios and communicate the financial impact to the finance department.

 

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