Enterprise contract management includes intellectual property agreements.

InformationWeek Staff, Contributor

January 12, 2005

3 Min Read

VentanaMonitor™

To become a player in the knowledge economy by generating revenue from intellectual capital (IC), businesses must build and leverage their intellectual property (IP) portfolios. Ventana Research believes optimizing the utilization of IP assets is a key part of innovation performance management by helping to realize the value of innovation in the marketplace. The Nextance Intellectual Property Optimization Suite is specifically designed to realize more value from IP assets.

Assessment

The Nextance Intellectual Property Optimization Suite focuses on delivering three IP management capabilities: IP Portfolio Management, IP Deal Management and IP Revenue Management.

Portfolio Management focuses on capturing IP and creating a centralized IP agreement repository so it can be easily searched and the content and status of specific IP quickly understood. The aim is to improve the utilization of the known IP inventory and to decrease risk by making it easier to track contractual compliance associated with IP licensing.

Deal Management leverages the IP asset inventory to develop asset “terms of use” and licensing business cases and to initiate and track market opportunities relating to asset licensing. These capabilities benefit from the strong workflow layer that supports the application to track deal status and maintain deal momentum to enable faster deal cycles and better customer relationships.

Revenue Management is licensing agreement-focused in that it facilitates the rapid assembly of agreements using templates and pre-approved clauses. It also uses redlining to capture all changes to agreements to ensure an agreement version history can be traced.

Dashboards are used both to track the financial performance of IP assets and asset groups and to support role-based participation in the processes to monitor task-based work in progress and to-do items at the individual and workgroup level items.

Market Impact

The Nextance Intellectual Property Optimization Suite targets Fortune 1000-level organizations and is part of an overall Enterprise Contract Management (ECM) application, Nextance Intelligent Enterprise, which also includes Revenue Optimization and Procurement Optimization Suites. These applications are primarily designed to manage complex sales, purchase and IP agreements that are resource-intensive to create, and to maintain and ensure they are fully leveraged and complied with commercially. The Nextance IP solution is unlikely to be justifiable unless the cost of the system represents less than a few percent of the overall licensing value of your IP portfolio.

Recommendation

Ventana Research recommends that existing users of Nextance Revenue or Procurement Optimization Suites, who have large IP portfolios, evaluate the IP Optimization Suite, simply because the application design paradigm is similar, which helps to reduce the implementation learning curve. Other Fortune 1000-level organizations that are looking for ways to leverage better performance from their IP portfolio or kickstart a more offensive IP licensing initiative should also include Nextance on their shortlist.

Stewart McKie is European Analyst Director at Ventana Research.

Ventana Research is the preeminent research and advisory services firm helping our clients maximize stakeholder value with Performance Management throughout their organizations. Putting research in a business and IT context we provide insight and education on the best practices, methodologies and technologies that enable our clients to leverage assets to understand, optimize, and align strategies and processes to meet their goals and objectives.

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