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Among the most valuable assets an organization has is its intellectual property (IP). Much of that IP exists in digital form, and IP management is becoming more of an issue for technology executives. As the management of IP becomes more complex — particularly with the extensive sharing of information among business partners — organizations can use a variety of software products designed to help manage IP.

In the past, IP often was limited to patents on products or ideas, or some physical object, such as an invention. Now, IP can also be in the form of software applications and digital media. The stakes can be high for failing to manage digital and physical IP assets properly: Companies can lose a lot of money in potential revenue from licensing or have IP used in an unauthorized way.

Among the potential threats to IP protection are key employees leaving the organization and taking IP-related documents or knowledge with them, and security breaches that result in theft or damage of IP information. Enterprises also need to ensure that IP is being used correctly, or they risk losing revenue from such assets.

Some organizations are keeping track of their IP assets electronically, and vendors can provide software products and services designed to help organizations manage IP assets. These offerings can be used to monitor assets such as patents, invention disclosures, copyrights and trademarks, and can provide a single view of an organization’s IP portfolio. Some solutions include features to help ensure that the appropriate nondisclosure agreements and licenses are in place, to protect against abuses.

IP management software automates the process of managing assets, eliminating the need for time-consuming, labor-intensive and often error-prone manual processes.

Automating IP management is becoming all the more important given the growing complexity of information and idea exchange. For companies that do a lot of partnering on product design, development and manufacturing, or that acquire many products or technologies in the course of business, IP management can get complicated.

“You're creating these new issues [of] who owns what and how to manage that ownership,” says Kathy Harris, an analyst at Gartner Inc. IT can play a significant role in helping to manage the information related to intellectual property, Harris says, including maintaining records of interactions among the business partners, keeping track of the dates interactions took place, and recording the nature of the interactions.

A trend that’s likely to add even more complexity to the management of IP is the growing use of newer online collaboration technologies and social networking sites and communities, Harris says.

“We talk about these as just a way to share ideas, but there’s a line at which content becomes a monetizable kind of asset,” Harris says. But it might not be clear who actually owns the content at certain points of its development. “Organizations are going to have to get a lot smarter about this whole topic and keep an audit trail of who contributed what,” she says. Again, IT will probably have a large role to play in that process.

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