Protean Intellectual Property Assessment Services

Intellectual property (IP) includes significant, vulnerable and potentially volatile assets, which can have a large impact on the profitability and business risk of the enterprise. Management of IP is critical to the overall management of the business, and it should be subject to formal strategic direction no less important than the marketing, product and technology strategies of the company.

The Protean IP strategy development approach is to identify the market opportunity and the risk profile of each "property." We then formulate a series of optional future IP protection initiatives and identify the contingencies under which each one should be executed. For a particular property, there may be a wide variety of protection options, and the preference will vary according to future marketing activities and competitor responses. We will work with client management to map out the most valuable response to each known future contingency.

The other side of intellectual property strategy involves the enterprise's ability to effectively utilize the IP of providers and partners, and also to control the actions of customers and competitors. Contract strategy is critical to the future agility of the enterprise in taking services to market that exploit synergies between and among vendors and strategic partners, while concurrently inhibiting abuse by customers and competitors. As with the protection of ownership, expansion of utilization is a critical competitive advantage.