Development of Intellectual Property Management - Cases from German and Swedish Biotechnology Companies

Abstract In recent years the management of IP underwent major changes and a rapid recognition in industry has risen that there is a need to integrate IP into strategic management. This thesis aims to contribute to this field of research focusing on the development of IP management in dedicated biotechnology firms (DBFs) throughout the last ten years. The purpose of this thesis is to describe and explore the history of IP management in selected larger German and Swedish companies operating in biotechnology related fields, while trying to identify measures for IP management performance. Three main research questions were defined in order to accomplish this purpose. (i) How can different stages in a company’s IP management be characterised? (ii) What has been the role of different IPRs in different IP management stages? (iii) How to measure the economic performance of IP management? In order to accomplish these research questions, six case studies were conducted in German and Swedish DBFs, with ‘rich experience’ in IP management. Throughout the study different stages of IP management could be identified in all case com-panies. However, the stages differed in several characteristics. Six criteria were found which characterise an IP management stage best while shifts towards another IP management stage were found to be caused either by internal or external. These events can be said to be single crucial events or an accumulated sum of events. Further, it could be identified that in different IP management stages the roles of different IPRs changed. Further, it was found that in differ-ent IP management stages the roles of different IPRs changed. To assess the performance of an IP department it was found that no single measure fits this purpose, rather a set of quantitative and qualitative measures needs to be developed which aim to judge upon the effectiveness to reach strategic company objectives and efficiency of the current IP management. Three problems were found when judging the IP management performance. Apart from these problems, this study suggests to assess the IP management performance on the consistence of the company’s technology base as well as by the six crite-ria which characterise an IP management stage. However, these seven criteria need to be bro-ken down further and specifically for each individual company