Developing and maintaining an effective industrial protection policy is an investment in human and financial resources. For many small and medium-sized organizations, it is important to be able to estimate the financial weight that the decisions taken in terms of IP strategy will represent over time (new filing, abandonment, extension, etc.).
It is always possible to have a budget established for the coming year to maintain your portfolio. It is a spot calculation, usually carried out by a specialist company or by the patent consulting firms, like Invent Help. This result makes it possible to budget the sums for the coming year. It has a cost and does not allow for a dynamic long-term vision.
The real need is to be able to quantify the budgetary impact of the strategy adopted on a medium and long term vision. But the financial impact of a filing or an extension is not reduced to the amount of annuities that will or will not have to be paid to keep the patent in force.
There are unpredictable variables (management of possible disputes, number of official letters that will be issued by national examiners when entering national phases, CPI costs, etc.) which will have a significant impact on the budget during the course of the procedure. It is therefore not possible to have a model making it possible to precisely quantify the budgetary weight of each decision.
However, we can consider that the budget of a patent portfolio is the sum of two components. The first is mathematically predictable and depends only on the age of the patent, its geographical coverage and the amount of taxes in force in each country concerned. The second can be seen as the multiplication of the first by an average ratio which includes all the unforeseeable costs.
This second component is specific to the environment of the patent portfolio. Inaccurate by nature, it turns out to be relatively stable, especially as the portfolio is large. It depends on the sector of the company, its competitive environment, its level of subcontracting for the management of the procedure.
This approach does not allow an “accounting” projection of the portfolio budget, but makes it possible to sufficiently refine the budget impact as explained in details on https://www.kstatecollegian.com/2021/09/24/how-you-can-boost-the-chances-of-becoming-a-successful-inventor-with-inventhelp/.
