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The Untapped Potential of IP Finance

Over the past few years, business, legal, and accounting authorities have quite rightly pointed out that corporate IP has far greater potential than its owners usually exploit. The consultancy McKinsey & Company has offered that, as a rule of thumb, a company that owns at least 450 patents and spends $50 million or more a year on R&D should possess enough intellectual property to bring some of it to market. Typically, 10% of the patent portfolio could be put to work in this way. McKinsey also suggests that IP assets could generate 5% to 10% of a company's operating income with little initial capital investment. Thus, effective IP-asset management can be equivalent to the improvement that might be expected from a 20% cut in expenses or from a successful acquisition. See Elton JJ, Shah BR, and Voyzey JN, 'Intellectual Property. Partnering for Profit,' The McKinsey Quarterly, 2002, Number 4 Technology.

But talk, even at the engagement rates of a McKinsey consultant, is still relatively cheap. On the other hand, nonperforming assets do no one any good, and no rational CFO takes pride in sleeping patents and other inactive IP. So why is IP so hard to monetize? One potential explanation for the underutilization of IP assets may be that current conventional monetization strategies are difficult to implement with respect to such assets ' even when a company overwhelmingly needs and desires such financial benefit. So, the question remains: What alternatives could such a company employ?

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