Edison in the Boardroom Revisited: How Leading Companies Realize Value from Their Intellectual Property, Second Edition

What Level Three Companies Are Trying to Accomplish

Companies at Level Three see their IP as business assets, not just as legal ones. As business assets, the bits and pieces of a company’s IP can become puzzle pieces in answering the great question: How can we succeed in building this company’s value?

At this level, companies typically want to accomplish four things:

1. Identify the kinds of value they want from their IP.

2. Develop a value capture strategy.

3. Organize the company to capture value.

4. Develop IP reporting metrics.

Notice that we have changed the wording in a significant way. We used to think in terms of “extracting value” from intangibles. But over the years, it has become clear that companies are both creating and extracting value from their intellectual property. From the perspective of a company at Level Three, the activities and decision points in the top row of the IP Management System (IPMS) are closely associated with how the company plans to create value through its intellectual property, whereas the activities and decisions along the bottom row generally encompass what and how the company will go about converting IP into business value. Hence, we realize that Level Three companies are looking to capture the value of their IP.

It should also be noted that companies at Level Three have shifted the focus of their IP management (IP as a legal asset focused on risk reduction) toward business activity (IP as a business asset focused on value creation and ...