Post 13: Building Patent Fortresses

New technologies face furious competition, and innovation is led by the tight battle among the technological leaders. However, effective intellectual property protection can help the companies keep the competitive advantage. Currently, executives fail to create a thorough patent strategy to protect their intellectual property and this leads to distraction of their resources and time on litigation processes.


The expensive litigation and defensive acquisitions of patent portfolios are the outcomes of intense rivalries; for example, see Google's purchase of 1,000 IBM patents, a consortium's purchase of 6,000 Nortel
patents3 and Facebook's purchase of 750 IBM patents.

Gartner suggests for the companies to create a well-thought patent strategy, or build the "fortresses" to be more effective in their Intellectual Property protection. Nowadays the market faces extensive competition with a lot of new innovative products but very small differentiation among them. This leads to a patent war among the companies. Striving to enter the market as soon as possible and gain the biggest market share possible without careful consideration of its patent portfolio makes companies face huge losses in the future during patent war and rigorous litigation processes. The best way to minimize threat of involvement in the patent war is to create effective patent portfolio of all the features and functions of the product at its development stage before the launch onto the market.

In the table below, Gartner discusses possible ways for the company to be more effective in its patent strategy.

The best way to create an effective patent strategy is to file the patents for all the features and functionalities of the product at its development stage, research patent portfolio of the competition and watch it through the process of product launching onto the new market.

Gartner Research: Avoid Future Legal Battles by Investing in 'Patent Fortresses'