In the Spotlight: Creating big value from big data

Companies across the world are looking to harness the power of information and analytics to make themselves more agile, leaner and ultimately more profitable. Applying information to drive better insight is leading to more effective decision-making in business. In January the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that 60% of the professionals questioned felt that insight from big data is already generating revenue within their organisations, while 83% felt that it was making existing products and services more profitable.

Intellectual property, often seen as a ‘back office’ function, will not be exempt from this trend. Indeed, chief IP officers who embrace the opportunities afforded by better analysis of the myriad of information now available to them will be able to ensure that their IP portfolio demonstrably contributes to the company’s bottom line.

A historical perspective

Tyron Stading, president and founder of Innography, a CPA Global company that provides advanced analytics services to IP professionals and lawyers, believes that many of the tools and processes used by IP organisations have not evolved as fast as the businesses they serve. This is particularly true in the digital age when the acquisition, protection and monetisation of IP lies at the core of business value.

He comments: “In many cases, up to 85% of a company’s value lies in its intangible assets and IP is often a key driver in the most high-profile acquisitions and mergers that make business news headlines. Almost every company can improve its efficiency through the application of new technologies to drive increased insight by combining internal and external data sources.”

CPA Global is pioneering a new generation of modern IP management systems (IPMS) to help organisations better understand not only the cost of protecting innovation, but also the broader value of an IP portfolio. As Stading explains, this is an important distinction: “Every IP department will be able to identify the cost of managing ideas protection. More advanced companies may be able to identify how much revenue the IP portfolio generates for an organisation annually, demonstrating the return on investment that IP protection delivers to the company.

“Fewer will be able to identify the most important IP within the organisation or indeed be able to offer the business counsel on where the next generation of IP should focus.

“However, with the tools becoming available to them, chief IP officers should not only be able to achieve all of this, but also offer strategic direction to the business around key board level questions such as ‘how do we compare to our competitors in terms of core technology?’, ‘are we behind or ahead in our key areas of technology?’, and ‘where should we invest in the future to continue to grow?’”

Technology transforms IP management

Central to this new vision, new technologies have emerged that are transforming the way companies can interrogate large sets of data. According to Stading these include:

The availability of new and complex sources of data (litigation, prosecution, financial, product, etc) and intelligence applied to increase their quality/accuracy. Particularly relevant are sources of data that can be plugged into systems via application program interfaces (APIs) offering a data source updated in real time;