Tell a good IP story and investors are interested in funding your start-up. Tell them the same old “we’ve got a great product and management team” and they’ll probably walk away.
Your intellectual property is directly linked to the future success and revenues of your start-up. You’ve got little or no revenue, large research and development expenses, and few tangible assets. Your start-ups’ primary and most valuable asset is its intellectual property –patents, trade secrets, trademarks, or copyrights.
Intellectual property is also the difference between success and failure in raising more capital. The importance of IP to startup funding is supported by a recent white paper from the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”). Its findings concluded that IP is now an essential element in obtaining venture funding.
Your IP story tells why IP is integral to your products or technologies, and how it’s linked to your market opportunities. It tells investors how you’ll maximize their investment by strategically managing and using your IP. More importantly, it tells investors why your IP sets your start-up apart from the competition, and the specific actions you’ll take to make sure your IP assets are managed to their full money-making potential.
Telling your IP story builds confidence with investors. Your IP story must show investors how your intellectual property is aligned with your business strategy, and how you’ll use it to grow and expand, such as:
- Giving your start-up a unique competitive advantage to secure a market and gain significant market share;
- Generating significant licensing revenue, both within your primary markets and in ancillary markets;
- Gaining a stronger negotiating position and better contracts with suppliers, customers and partners.
Before you can tell your IP story, you must know what you have, otherwise you wind up telling only part of the story. It’s not just patents, trademarks and copyrights. Your IP assets go well beyond the technology that gets baked into your products to include branding, know-how, trade secrets, and more. Sometimes these other parts are more valuable than your core IP. One example is GE’s patented diamond processing technology. The most valuable part was the production process trade secrets, in which GE continued to get companies interested in licensing it long after the patents expired.
Today’s investors are looking for start-ups with intellectual property. Study after study is confirming that start-ups with IP assets significantly outperform those without IP. But if you’re IP story isn’t part of your start-up story, you’re likely flying under the investor radar.
