Patent portfolio

WIPO's guide for small and medium-sized enterprises gives two reasons that relate to the portfolio as a whole. First, in some sectors such as biotechnology, a strong patent portfolio is often a requirement to attract investors. Second, business partners, investors and customers will often see patent portfolios as a demonstration of the high level of expertise, specialization and technological capacity of the company³.

WIPO's valuation guide lists managing portfolios in a non-deal-oriented capacity as a reason for valuing IP. It says this is often undertaken by academic or research organizations with large IP portfolios, to optimize their use of resources and focus commercialization efforts on the most promising IP². See Patent valuation.

WIPO's SME guide presents a list of steps for patent risk management. The steps that refer to the portfolio and the patents in it are³:

• decide who will have overall responsibility for managing the company's patent portfolio³;
• determine whether a granted patent will be used offensively, defensively or mainly for branding and marketing³;
• regularly update the enterprise's documented inventory of owned and in-licensed patents³;
• undertake periodic risk analysis by looking at the patent portfolios and patent strategies of competitors³;
• develop a financial strategy to cover all the costs of creating, maintaining, using, enforcing and defending the patent portfolio³;
• and periodically revisit and revise the patent strategy as part of a periodic or event-driven IP audit³.

The same list includes identifying partnering or licensing-in opportunities³. See Patent management for the wider topic.

In a cross license, WIPO's licensing guide says that where there is unequal value in the respective patent portfolios, the party with the lesser patent values may agree to supplement its license grant with some form of payment⁴. A cross license is one in which both parties exchange license grants of approximately equal value instead of paying each other⁴.

Licensing a group of patents together is also the basis of a Patent pool. The UK Intellectual Property Office describes a patent pool as an agreement between two or more patent owners to license one or more of their patents to one another or to third parties¹. See Patent pool for a fuller definition and the EU competition-law view.