IP teams need to navigate ‘massive transformation’ in 2024, says study
Whitepaper explores challenges facing IP this year and what experts think will be key to success | AI could free up IP teams to focus on strategy, according to report.
IP practitioners should focus on business objectives, clean up their portfolios and embrace AI to navigate what is set to be a challenging and transformative year in the industry, according to a new whitepaper.
Published in January by IP management company Tradespace, Tech, the Economy and IP Transformation: IP Strategies for a New Era is based on interviews with thought leaders in the IP community, and their insights and recommendations for 2024.
The “new era” refers to what Tradespace says is a massive transformation facing the IP industry, as sweeping changes across technology, business and the workforce converge to form a new reality that may materialise this year.
Pressure to cut costs, lack of resources, overworked staff and innovation rapidly outpacing the legal system are just some of the challenges facing IP teams, according to Tradespace’s research.
Value-driven IP
The experts interviewed for the whitepaper identified some key areas that IP practitioners should focus on to overcome the hurdles facing the industry.
These included a more business-focused approach to IP, making sure strategy was aligned with company objectives, and conveying the relevance of a firm’s IP to its leadership.
Exploring “riskier” strategies such as IP monetisation or new, emerging options like IP-backed financing was also suggested.
More value could be extracted from IP if patent portfolios were “cleaned up” to reflect quality, not quantity, according to the research, with IP teams being empowered by better data and insights to “stop supporting low quality assets”.
AI will ‘let IP do more with less’
According to Tradespace’s research, “overwhelming service demand, market complexity, and resource constraint” means that IP teams can no longer afford to ignore AI.
The thought leaders Tradespace spoke to advised that this should be the year that IP leaders plan to adopt AI, which could in turn help solve some of the industry’s problems, from freeing up time to focus on strategy and identifying monetisation opportunities to managing IP more effectively.
“AI will finally let IP do more with less, a lot more,” the authors of the report wrote.
Another trend identified in the whitepaper was an increasing focus on trade secrets, due to factors including the difficulty in patenting software and the Thaler v Vidal ruling that AI cannot be an inventor of patents.
Tradespace said that best practices around trade secrets were inconsistent, and that they required “measures at asset level, not sweeping assertions of rights for the whole enterprise”.
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