Extracting product opportunities from intellectual property portfolios : from patent to product idea

Abstract

Companies and research institutes maintain large intellectual property portfolios, which are considered company assets and require significant investments to maintain. This thesis looks at the potential to extract value from such portfolios through new product development to offset this capital investment. Traditionally the IP protects existing products or excludes competitors from entering a given market. Alternatively this process looks to move from intellectual property (IP) to product ideas (PI), hereafter referred to as the IP2PI process ... [figure 1]. As outlined in Figure 1 the IP2PI process starts with intellectual property as the main input. Next the IP2PI process itself consists of three steps: -- Understanding the IP and key technologies included therein, -- Identifying market opportunities and applications of the technologies, and -- Evaluating product ideas based on market needs and other criteria.