Patent Portfolios: Quality, Creation, and Cost

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PATENT PORTFOLIOS is directed specifically to people who manage patent portfolios, or who advise others on the management of patent portfolios. The book answers three questions: 1. What is an excellent patent portfolio? 2. How is it possible to obtain an excellent patent portfolio? 3. What is the cost to obtain an excellent patent portfolio? Specific portfolios are presented as examples illustrating the principles of excellence. The book includes four chapters. • Chapter 1 presents the basic concepts of a “portfolio” as sed to a single patent. Ten principles of high-quality patent portfolios are discussed, including, among others, corporate & patent strategies, geographic & time balance, criteria for measuring the success of a patent program, and placement of the patenting function within a company. • Chapter 2 discusses ways of creating an excellent patent portfolio. The chapter reviews in detail two major portfolio decisions (build or buy, and quality or quantity), and presents a model for an in-house patent program to create an excellent portfolio. • Chapter 3 discusses budgeting for investment in patents, including benchmarks for patent investing and the four most common methods used by companies to budget their investments in patent portfolios. These methods are Top Down Budgeting (focusing on costs), Bottom Up Budgeting (focusing on results), Competitive Budgeting (focusing on competition), and Hybrid Budgeting (a combination of the foregoing methods). • Chapter 4 is a Summary in Question & Answer format, with particular emphasis on Basic Characteristics of Excellent Portfolios, Managing the Portfolio, Budgeting for Patents, Technology Inflection Points, Patent Aggregation, and Patent Evaluation. This book completes a trilogy called “The Patent Quality Series”, which includes the earlier books TRUE PATENT VALUE (excellence in individual patents), and LITIGATION-PROOF PATENTS (the most common mistakes that prevent patents from achieving their true excellence).