Intellectual Property rights (IPR) has always been viewed as a cost center and never associated with revenue-driving initiative. This makes it difficult to get approval and justify security budgets and expenditures on IP registration, CAD packages, design outsourcing, CAD training, processes and procedures.
In the past, the effectiveness of IPR spending has used soft measurements-aspects such as spending on IPR services relative to the value of the design, or by preventing the leak of design information from the work place to the competitors. This created residual space, because it didn’t demonstrate cost savings/profit or IP loss from/to the competitors.
Developing appropriate Intellectual Property (IP) risk metrics can help you communicate the business value of an effective R&D program to your organization’s senior management. Through such metrics, you can assign measurable values to your R&D posture, allowing you to show tangible results.
Most manufacturing companies have finite budgets to spend on R&D. If, for instance, you have $100 to spend on R&D, where and how do you spend that money? Do you need to purchase a CAD package or outsource work and how does it subsequently impact your IP rights? Will you at some point lose the value of these CAD packages? At what instance will you receive the most value out of your R&D investments? Or, are you simply wasting money?
Many R&D managers cannot assess to what extent a CAD package is going to save their IP rights, or how much dollar loss will accrue without the use of a particular CAD package. Suitable IP risk metrics is required in order to measure or track a particular leak, and without a measure of perceived profits it’s useless. Such a metrics not only helps reduce the potential of threat or vulnerability of your designs but also enables you to determine the effectiveness of R&D.
Risk
Where do you begin? If you have no IP policy there is nothing to base on. The control processes and procedures must be clearly articulated. With the policy in place, you need to understand the design inventory. Next you must decide which designs need protection. If you don’t know their value, you will not know the monetary or man-hour protection of the designs you are providing. Once you have taken design inventory stock, you need to prioritize each design based on their risk leak. Is every single design in your inventory subjected to high-risk threat? Probably not. A priority mechanism must be drawn, classifying each of the designs into high, medium or low-risk assets. If you fail to identify which designs to protect, especially the highest risk ones, you will not profit with your IPR budget. It is likely that many have not prioritized your assets, but you must.
Next you must analyze what and how are your assets being subjected to vulnerabilities. Identify the threats from your competitors. Once you recognize your assets, vulnerabilities, and threats, you can calculate the risk. The product of these three parameters calculates risk and when each is measured the R&D engineers can apply remediation to high-risk designs followed by medium and low-risk designs.
Finally, you must ensure compliance with corporate and government regulations.
It is essential to analyze threat data on a daily or weekly basis and observe which designs are at high-risk. You must correlate threat, assets, and vulnerabilities frequently and change certain policies and procedures by assessing risk. This becomes a vicious cycle.
Measuring Process
Every company can develop its own measuring process. A basic metrics evaluation involves considering compliance at vendor, database, and designer’s levels. The score could range from zero if a design is not registered as IP to five if it exists. At the vendor level, all designs are under IPR, scoring five. However, the IP application is under screening, so the score could be two.
Through such scoring mechanism, one clearly envisions future spending during the next R&D budget.
Scoring zero on a particular design does not indicate need for investment. If you score zero on inventory of fixtures and your company is into design of medical equipments, then you do not need to invest on getting the fixtures under IP.
However, your business may require security to your new equipment designs, and so you need to invest. You can similarly develop your own metrics.
Risks vs. Money
You need to constantly monitor your competitor’s moves and bunch of new products in the market. Many R&D organizations prefer to utilize IP consultancies from an outside party. If you spend on IP, you should notice fewer IP conflicts in your company. The key is to validate your return on IP investment (RoIPI). You can also sell your IP rights to another company after keeping it with you for some time.
IP spending ensures continuous lead in the market thus keeping you products demand. By buying a CAD package you make sure that your design at conceptual stage is within your R&D team thus having a full control on it. Only then the investment on CAD package is validated.
These metrics can be used as a guide for spending and resource allocation, by showing specific returns on investments and tangible change measures. The metrics can be diligently tracked, benchmarked against industry averages. Companies can also compare the scores of their individual designs to apply the right IP measures to greatest risk areas in order to achieve significant cost reductions.
You now have a structure and standard to demonstrate the organization’s health from a security standpoint.
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