Tag: IP management

What does the new patent box tax regime mean for your IP (and R&D) strategy?

Switzerland is preparing a major corporate tax law change to comply with the new OECD international tax practice recommendations (BEPS Action 5) [Update: Swiss Parliament voted the new law in June 2016 , but finally the law was not accepted by the Swiss citizens consulted by referendum in February 2017. A new tax reform in currently back in the legislative agenda, which will take a few more years. The content of this article is therefore obsolete.]

The former tax rulings regimes which were quite opaque and only accessible to multinationals will be abandoned in favour of a more transparent system, that will be more beneficial to local SMEs and corporations with active R&D in Switzerland, in particular through a couple of measures:

  1. A Swiss patent box, for optimising tax on benefits which can be bound to certain qualifying IP, such as patents and equivalent rights if substantial activities, i.e. local R&D expenditures, are effectively carried out by the taxpayer (here, Switzerland is aligning to the OECD rules, incl. the NEXUS ratio)
  2. R&D investment deduction incentives, for optimising R&D investments and thus encouraging innovation.

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New IP management training in Paris, June 2014

Corinne Le Buhan will be teaching the new IEEPI IP management training “From IP strategy to IP operations” in Paris on June 13th, 2014: learn about practical IP strategies and key IP management challenges from various business environments, how to define your own organisation IP strategy and how to implement it in practice with various IP development, enforcement and commercialisation tactics. In this professional training, emphasis is put on simple management tools and checklists, illustrated with case studies from various industries, and a situational workshop experimentation.

This training will also be proposed in Bern on November 7th, 2014.

Patent analytics applications

In the last two decades, patent analytics methods have been developed, initially in the field of econometrics to measure R&D and technology innovation performance in different industry sectors and at national level, and now also at the corporate level, as they enable to better:

  • Scope internal R&D projects as well as open innovation collaborations, by formally identifying the technological differentiation of internal background assets but also the most suitable partners and suppliers in terms of the robustness and complementarity of their protected know-how compared to internal assets;
  • Identify and evaluate merger and acquisition targets in support to an external corporate growth strategy;
  • Identify and develop additional revenue opportunities from licensing agreements and technology transfers, as an extra direct return from former intellectual property development and protection investments.

In parallel, a number of economists are proposing new models and gathering experimental evidence on the application of emerging patent analytics to the fundamental analysis of a technology company’s value. This approach aims at better capturing the 70% to 80% ratio of stock valuation that is now attributable to intangible assets, a large part of which are formalized into significant patent portfolios in the case of high-tech companies. Better analysis of the latter assets is required to help both institutional and private investors select their value investment to secure mid-long term sustainable dividends beyond the short-term speculation profits derived from pure technical analysis of accounting and financial data. Continue reading →