Resilience is a key characteristic of an enduring company. A resilient organization is able to weather changes in economy, consumer preferences, globalization issues, and disruptive technologies. How can a company build up its ability to “absorb” shocks to the system and improve business risk management?

The use of intellectual property (IP) can provide a unique protection mechanism to business, in the form of patent protection. A well-thought-out IP strategy will anticipate many disruptive aspects to business operations and provide invention and creativity for building a defensive patent portfolio, create offensive patents ahead of other companies, devise publication schemes, and head off competitive attack via competitive analysis and strategy. Patent protection can reduce both current and future business risks. Thus, clever use of IP results in a resilient organization.

Our clients have asked us:

• What can help us build corporate resilience?
• What IP-related activities will be most effective in building resilience in our company?
• What areas of our business are most susceptible to surprise and change, and how can surprise and change be identified and avoided?
• How can we be forward-thinking and invent “ahead” of the market, to anticipate disruption?
• Should our company be more defensive or offensive in its approach?
• Can we use IP not only to increase resilience, but also to improve ROI?

There are a variety of ways that ipCG can guide a company that seeks resilience through use of IP. Some approaches include:

• Creation of a “landscape” that depicts your business space. This landscape can be used as a tool to predict value chain territorial shifts.
• Conducting IP mining and analytics and mapping the competitive IP on the landscape, to help identify areas of weakness and best areas of opportunity
• Building an IP strategy, to strengthen and increase resilience against competition
• Protecting core technology and product space provides an improved defensive position
• Identifying and protecting “new” territory provides an offensive position
• Consulting about how to employ novel IP tactics
• Developing proactively IP portfolios that are “futuristic” in the market
• Creating IP licensing techniques that monetize IP and provide new revenue streams
• Using IP to capture new business models and activities within them

ipCG has utilized a variety of tools and services with clients who have resilience as one of their key business issues. Some of these approaches are presented in our newsletter, “Growth Strategies: Executive Briefings on the Business of IP.”

To obtain more information or discuss your unique challenges please contact us.