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Marketing your IP “merchandise” to potential licensees can be a daunting process. How do you find potential licensees? And how should you approach them? Marketing workshops tend to suggest a haphazard mix of different tools and strategies that may or may not work. This chapter, however, offers a systematic approach to marketing that 1) will work for both the novice and the expert in most, if not all, situations; and 2) provides you with constant feedback so that you can continually refine your marketing approach. It contains several models for establishing contacts and prioritizing these according to specific criteria, as well as numerous helpful worksheets that will help you plan your marketing approach.

The marketing approach described in this chapter is made up of four basic steps:

Step 1. Collect information about the invention from the inventors
Step 2. Collect information from potential clients (licensees)
Step 3. Review and prioritize your prospective client list
Step 4. Make contact with potential clients

First, it is important to get a sense of the invention’s possibilities. By communicating with the inventors, you will not only gather helpful information about the invention, but will also build relationships with the people who provide your office with the “raw material” that you market. If you understand the invention thoroughly, it will be easier to find the right licensees. The chapter suggests a number of databases that may help you locate potential licensees.

Next, make a list of names and titles of your potential contacts, and then use the worksheets found in the appendix to this chapter to evaluate and rank your prospects. After contacting your prospects, send them follow-up letters, along with nonconfidential disclosures (regardless of whether or not they requested them).

This technique will teach you a great deal about the market for your “merchandise,” your potential licensees, and the value of your product.

Key Implications and Best Practices

Given that IP management is heavily context specific, these Key Implications and Best Practices are intended as starting points to be adapted to specific needs and circumstances.

For Government Policymakers

• Public-sector institutions, like private-sector institutions, need to market their intellectual property.
• Institute policies that will encourage public-sector institutions to market their innovations.

For Senior Management (university president, R&D manager, etc)

• Provide your technology transfer offices with sufficient resources so that they can effectively market their technologies.
• Public-sector institutions are not violating their own missions when they market their inventions. Marketing is the most effective way to move inventions into the public sphere.

For Scientists

• Share your ideas about what applications you think your invention might have.
• The groundbreaking science behind an invention is usually not its selling point.

For Technology Transfer Officers

• Ask inventors to fill out a marketing information sheet (for example the form included in the chapter titled “Why We’re Asking You About Marketing Your Invention”). These sheets will both provide you with valuable information about how the invention might be marketed and also remind the inventors of the importance of technology marketing.
• Subscribe to an online database of potential licensees (for example, Knowledge Express Data Systems (KEDS)).
• Direct mail and computer bulletin boards are inefficient marketing tools.
• The telephone allows you to easily and inexpensively communicate with potential customers around the globe. Follow up each phone call with a brief letter and a nonconfidential description of the technology you hope to license.
• The effort you put into marketing will pay off, no matter how you want to sell your product. If you want to grant an exclusive license, marketing will increase the number prospects and therefore your own bargaining power. If you want to hand out nonexclusive licenses, the more effort you put into marketing, the more prospects you will have, and therefore the more licensing revenue will be generated.