Your IP is providing a barrier to entry—a set of fences to keep competitors away from what you’ve so painstakingly developed. Customers, products, and services are aligning with your IP strategy. You’ve identified a base camp for your company, and you’re populating the terrain around it with IP that can support your continued progress.
Your patents (and applications) are no longer promises of what might come later. They are solid paving stones for the roadway you’re building toward your commercial objectives. They are also anchors for the fencing you’re constructing to keep others out of the territory you’re working to occupy.
Your trademarks are connected with your company’s tangible productivity as identifiers for the goods and services you’ve developed in response to your customers’ needs. They are markers that brand your products and services as originating from your company, making it clear to customers and competitors that you’re the source. Trademarks are also deliberately out in the world to be seen and judged, taking on a life of their own as they speak for your company.
Your trade secrets, protected by their very secrecy, continue to expand their influence within the company, providing invisible grounding for its multidimensional growth.
Your copyrights cover the direct and perceptible expressions that define your company’s stance, explain your technology, or portray your journey, goals, or values across various media.
First, don’t change the successful tactics that brought you this far. You’ve achieved stability and growth by focusing on your customers and their problems, and by creating products and services that help them solve these problems.
But now you have additional responsibilities. Once you’ve accumulated assets, you need to manage them and develop them.
As a first step, you must inventory your IP assets. What IP does the company have? This is more than an administrative task. You’re also answering why the company has invested in this IP. In other words, you must connect each IP asset to the questions above. How does it relate to the company’s story and mission of providing customers with products or services that solve their real problems?
As a second step, identify the trajectory for developing these IP assets further. What functions are your assets serving right now, and how do they need to evolve to meet your customers’ needs?
And finally, recognize the new risks that come with staking out territory and making your presence known. You’ll find others who might already occupy ground you care about, or who want to block your path or create obstacles that slow you down. You need to identify these risks and determine how best to manage them.
Less straightforward is the process for identifying risks and managing them. This is a new dimension to consider: what IP risks might competitors present as you grow and accumulate assets? Risk management becomes central to your IP endeavors as you guide your company through territories occupied by competitors and past the impediments they place in your way.