Posts Tagged: "ROI"

SPIF Standard Launched to Help Reliably Identify Patent Assets in M&A and Other Transactions

Major mergers typically make for attention-grabbing news headlines but many legal professionals working at the ground floor of finalizing these mergers know that the path of M&A activity is fraught with concerns involving improper patent asset identification. The proliferation of IP recordal software solutions and patent data analytics tools in recent years has created an unintended problem in patent data formatting. With conflicting data formats, it’s sometimes the case that acquiring companies are provided data on patent assets being transferred, leading them to believe that they’re acquiring a different, and perhaps more valuable, asset than they’re actually getting in the deal. A free-to-use, open-source solution to this problem has recently been unveiled by a group of entities meeting at the intersection of patent acquisition and strategic IP management: standardized patent identification (SPIF), a standard developed with contributions from Richardson Oliver Insights, RPX, OIN, Cipher, IAM and Unified Patents. A conversion tool using the SPIF standard, made available online for free by Cipher, is designed to take patent identification information from different data formats and provide reliable identification of the exact patent assets that are identified in portfolio data from the entity transferring the patent.

Want a greater ROI for taxpayers? Restore the patent system, protect Bayh-Dole and cut the red tape strangling federal labs

Three events boosted our economic turnaround in the 1980’s: the passage of Bayh-Dole, which injected the incentives of patent ownership into the federal R&D system; the enactment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which insured the courts would apply the patent law consistently; and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Diamond v Chakraberty that living organisms could be patented. That decision stated that patents could “include anything under the sun that is made by man.” Today that quote is only ironic.

The Government Entrepreneur’s Dilemma   

Ironically, now that the Trump Administration’s prioritizing economic as well as scientific returns on investment from federal research, one of EPA’s best examples is gone. Others who share this faith are waiting to see what becomes of the Administration’s ROI initiative. One thing’s for certain, it’s going to take more than lofty pronouncements to steer this ship in a new direction. Until there are meaningful rewards for transforming federal laboratory discoveries into useful products, tech transfer will remain little more than window dressing.  With the Chinese right on our heels, that’s a luxury we can no longer afford.

Increasing the ROI from the Federal Labs

The biggest complaint about federal labs is it’s too hard to complete deals. Many federal labs must run pending agreements through byzantine departmental procedures. Companies wonder what’s taking so long and are surprised when negotiated points come back altered… One reason why universities outperform the labs is that many academic licensing officers come from the private sector. They understand the pressures companies are under to complete agreements.

How to Effectively Derive Return On Investment (ROI) From US Federal Research Intellectual Capital

A massive amount of intellectual capital gets created every day from $150 billion in annual research funding allocated to federal laboratories and universities in the United States. Unfortunately, most of that intellectual capital never makes it to the market and does not generate any ROI. Essentially more than 99% of the intellectual capital created at universities and federal labs are never protected and never gets translated to intellectual property, and hence those are almost never transferred through a license to a startup or an existing company. So, what happens to the majority of the intellectual capital that is not disclosed as inventions? That typically remains locked up at the university without access from the outside world.