Marketing-Based Patent Brokerage Services

When a large corporation's R&D staff creates a new product or an improvement or enhancement to an existing product, it usually files for a patent. A patent is a monopoly on an invention granted by the federal government to incentify and motivate innovation. Since the founding of U.S. over 200 years ago, almost nine million patents have been issued, and many credit America's global leadership in innovation as one of the benefits of the U.S. Patent system.

In fact, having a system of patents and copyrights was so important to our Founding Fathers that they included it in the original U.S. Constitution that was ratified in 1788. What we think of as fundamental U.S. rights - freedom of the press and habeas corpus, for example - did not come along until the Bill of Rights - the first ten amendments to the Constitution - were ratified in 1791.

However, when an individual - and not a business - invents something and files for a patent for the invention, what does he do with the patent? We all know what Apple, Microsoft and Google do with their patents - they create products and services from them, and sue anyone (for example, when Apple sued Samsung back in 2012 for infringing its iPhone patents) for patent infringement. But what does an individual - "Joe Inventor" - do with his patent when he does hot have a factory out back in which he can make products that use the patent?

He turns the patent over to a patent broker in the hope that the patent broker will find a buyer or licensee for his patent. IPOfferings, a leading patent brokerage firm, was founded back in 2008. The company leadership realized pretty quickly that if it just followed the same business plan as all the other patent brokers - create a list of prospects and make cold calls - it could only generate the same results as any other patent broker.

So the IPOfferings team decided to take a different approach to patent brokerage and to focus on marketing in addition to selling. Rather than just contacting 15 or 20 or 25 prospective buyers via phone calls and e-mails, why not use marketing to reach thousands of prospects? Using state-of-the-art marketing, IPOfferings quickly realized that it could reach thousands - even tens of thousands - of prospects, and cast a much wider net!

IPOffering features the patents it represent in a monthly e-letter that goes to over 9,000 corporate and IP executives. IPOfferings lists the patents it represents in the Patent Marketplace section of its search-engine-optimized website. What is search-engine-optimized? Go to Google, search for "patent brokerage" and see what pops up at the top of the page. That's SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The patents listed at the website are seen by the hundreds of visitors the website gets each day. IPOfferings gets articles placed in the trade press about the patents they represent, exposing them to tens of thousands of prospective buyers!

Does it work? Half of the patents that IPOfferings sells or licenses for one of its clients comes from a buyer or licensee who was NOT on the original prospect list!

IPOfferings is a full-service firm that also offers three patent valuation services as well as a comprehensive package of intellectual property consulting services.

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