By JiNan Glasgow George, CEO of Patent Forecast

Patents, baseball cards and Harry Potter books all have something in common – the older they get, the higher a value they can command.

Patents are often more valuable later in life because the innovations covered by its claims are so novel that they are years ahead of the market.

For example, there are dozens of patents from the 2000s on up covering the visual rendering of a user interface on a GPS location. When issued years ago, the patents covering technology weren’t that big of a deal, but think about how that’s commonplace. Just google “GPS patent litigation” and you’ll see how sought-after these patents are.

Another technology way ahead of its time covered converting speech to text in automated real time. When those patents were issued, the practice was used mostly for the closed captioning of broadcast TV shows. But today, YouTube and other online streaming services all have their videos audio tracks converted to text and the indexes are searchable.

The value of the patent portfolio increases as the market evolves into the patent claims scope.

If your company is ahead of the market and preciently so, and there are continuations open, your portfolio is going to have a higher value the more commercial activity that exists in your sector.

How would a company with hundreds or even thousands of patents know if there’s a first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sitting in its archives? Most large companies don’t know what patents they have, and often spend large amounts of money on patents that have nothing to do with their core business. [continued..]

That’s an easy one – data. There are visualization tools on the market that can quickly determine if a patent’s claims and scope put it in a hot, highly-litigated area. Companies looking to block out their competitors would find such patents extremely valuable, not to mention parties involved in litigation.

If you’d like to take the next step towards assessing what your patent is worth, or creating a solid IP portfolio strategy, visit patentforecast.io