For any business that deals with innovation in the life sciences or high tech, avoiding IP risk and optimizing expenses are critical priorities. To realize the full value of their innovation, patentees need a reliable way to insure their portfolios against various types of risk, without scaling the size of their teams. In this post, we will discuss the various forms of IP risk, and how AI-powered innovation intelligence answers the need for the accurate and scalable monitoring of technical data that enables sound decision-making.
In the process, we will demonstrate how, even for small companies and startups, the cost of investing in these next-generation technologies is negligible in comparison with the mission-ending costs that can arise from IP risk.
Categories of IP risk
The authors of Edison in the Boardroom identify three broad categories of IP risk:
- Intrinsic risks: those factors that are part and parcel of the patent process, and that companies can manage to some extent
- Innovation risks: the inherently uncertain nature of creating a new product or service and making it publicly available.
- Environmental risks: conditions may change due to regulatory action or competitors’ moves. This type of risk is obviously difficult to manage but needs to be understood.
Unlike the other two, intrinsic risks can be minimized, if a company takes steps to improve the validity and enforceability of its patents. For example, IP professionals do extensive searches of existing patents to ensure that theirs is not a derivative of any patent that has already been filed. This is a necessary exercise because a finding of prior art can invalidate a patent, or even result in IP infringement. Only on the back of extensive research can any company be sure that its patent is fully valid.
The obvious problem here is that ruling out prior art in this way is extremely time-consuming, even for companies with large teams (more on this later).
The trolls lurking under the bridge
Another ever-present risk to innovation is that of non-practicing entities (NPEs), pejoratively known as “trolls”. These are entities that use IP in bad faith to sue companies for infringement. Typically, this is done using portfolios of unused patents, with the goal of settling just below the cost of litigation. By some estimates, NPEs file around two-thirds of all patent disputes. And with patent trolling on the rise, it’s more important than ever before that businesses have a way to stay ahead of bad actors and protect their interests.
Costs of IP litigation
IP infringement lawsuits – legitimate or not – are expensive indeed. All told, the cost from discovery to disposition can easily run into the millions, with the average cost somewhere between $2 million and $4 million in the United States.
Conventional risk management
The key to staying ahead of all of these risks is knowing the landscape in sufficient detail to avoid missteps, and anticipate competitors’ moves before they happen. But that’s difficult to achieve using a conventional approach to IP management, which usually involves intensive manual searching and monitoring of technical data across multiple channels.
How AI helps
Expediting your FTO analysis with sound, up-to-date data gleaned from a multitude of sources is the only way to soundly and securely stay on top of current and emerging IP risks. The fastest, most-efficient way to do this is to fast-track your innovation intelligence with the help of AI and deep learning, allowing you to assess existing and potential IP risks and identify opportunities with zero latency.
AI-delivered insights bring the data you need to you, eliminating unnecessary manual research and enabling you to make faster, more agile decisions based on real-time patent and IP opportunities and mitigate the risks of high-potential business threats before they impact your bottom line.
Similari: your partner in innovation intelligence
At Similari, our mission is to make innovation easily accessible through smart, strategic AI, machine learning, and automation capabilities. Our platform is both robust and intuitive, able to track and consolidate millions of data points into condensed, actionable insights for quick, effective strategy generation and decision-making.
Say goodbye to costly, mission-ending errors resulting from inefficient IP opportunity identification and analysis and hello to end-to-end efficiency and productivity gains that come from having all the data you need at your fingertips when you need it.