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The Reasons for conducting an IP Audit

Many organisations do not know what intellectual property or IP assets they own.  We actually prefer the term intangible assets to the term IP assets.  Intangible assets include both legal intangibles (typical IP) and competitive intangibles (such as knowledge and know-how).  The tangible assets (like buildings, vehicles, or stock) that an organisation owns are usually known and therefore well managed.  But the intangibles are often neglected and often an organisation does not know what it owns.  It sounds crazy I know, but it is true.  In today’s knowledge economy where many organisations have far more intangible assets than tangible assets and the intangible assets are often much more valuable then the tangible assets, this is a big problem.

If you don’t know it exists you cannot exploit it to create value for shareholders

There are many reasons why an organisation might not know about all of their intangible assets.  It could be that the organisation has acquired a new business recently - the due diligence that should have taken place before acquiring it may not have been conducted adequately.  Sometimes the intangible assets exist only within the head of a key individual and the knowledge or know-how has not yet been documented.

So, what should an organisation be doing?  Conducting an IP audit (or intangible asset audit) is the best method to find out what intangible assets are owned and to document them.

An IP audit (or intangible asset audit) can be described as a systematic review of the intellectual property (or intangible assets) owned, used, or acquired by an organisation.

What are the benefits of doing an IP audit?  Here is a list of some of the benefits an organisation may hope to receive:

• Create value for stakeholders - both through the identifying of new IP and facilitating the effective exploitation of both old and new IP.   Increase revenue and gain a competitive advantage over competitors.
• Manage IP - an organisation can determine how best to manage its IP.
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