Pulling Back the Curtain: Calculating Return on Investment of Patent Portfolios

Measuring the return on an organisation’s greatest and most expensive asset

Return on Investment (ROI) is a widely used measure of efficiency or profitability of an investment. It measures the return on a particular investment relative to its cost and has been applied across virtually every area of business from R&D, brand, marketing and information technology.

Although ROI is routinely used to identify ways to enhance the performance of investments, it has not been applied to patent portfolios. 

With $40bn spent on patent portfolios every year, it’s no surprise that more questions are being asked about the value of those patent assets.

And indeed, whether the organisation is receiving maximum returns on such a substantial investment.

Jeremiah Chan and Jonathan Liu from Facebook, and Nigel Swycher and Steve Harris from Cipher authored a report titled, Pulling Back the Curtain: Calculating Return on Investment of Patent Portfolios. The report covers the following areas:

• Why is it important to measure ROI?
• Is Portfolio ROI too difficult to measure?
• The building blocks of ROI analysis
• Applying the ROI calculation to a hypothetical company

While there is some inherent complexity in calculating Portfolio ROI, the message in this report is both simple and direct: Portfolio ROI identifies which parts of your portfolio are delivering value to your organisation and which are not.

The steps in the process will be enlightening, and the destination delivers clarity about what needs to change and why.

The data, the tools and the model are all ready to be used. Perhaps it’s time to pull back the curtain.