Today, 75 to 90% of the market capitalization of listed companies consists of intangible assets, a significant portion of which is its Intellectual Property. This phenomenon concerns non-listed companies just as much, including SMEs. To accompany this strategic evolution and help companies transform their innovation capacity into value creation, PI Motion offers pragmatic, affordable, and accessible management solutions to organizations holding Intellectual Property rights, regardless of the size of their portfolio. Meet Ingrid Duquet, President of PI Motion.
What does PI Motion do?
We develop business-oriented IT solutions for the management and optimization of Intellectual Property portfolios. Intellectual Property is a complex domain that involves different and complementary strategic expertise: technical, legal, financial, and commercial. We help make information clear and accessible to all stakeholders in the company’s innovation ecosystem. We have developed and commercialized the collaborative software solution PI Planner since 2017. It is an intuitive, ergonomic tool designed for IP managers and leaders of innovative startups, SMEs, intermediate-sized companies (ETIs), and large Groups who want to digitize the management of their Intellectual Property to fully integrate it into their decision-making processes. PI Planner is not purely a legal tool and is not exclusively aimed at IP experts. It has been designed so that all companies, whether or not they have an internalized IP service, can take control of these aspects and integrate them into their overall strategy. Key performance indicators, dashboards, and reports bring a business dimension and enable the implementation of a real IP policy, anticipate decisions to be made, and forecast future costs. From capturing ideas to monitoring their protection, PI Planner helps companies transform their innovation capacity into value creation, enabling them to activate different levers such as licensing, direct valuation, rights assignment, or collaboration contract management.
What are the key features of your PI Planner application?
Managing an IP portfolio is a series of arbitrations that must be made based on shared information. PI Planner allows you to centralize all data concerning patents, trademarks, designs, software, domain names and software, domain names, and know-how detailed data on each family of titles: technical content attached documents, and the status of proceedings in each country of extension. Indicators such as overall cost per family or technology cluster, budget projections, and segmentation by type of valorization enable you to control your budget, optimize return on investment, and rationalize costs. Global indicators provide an overall view of the portfolio’s dynamics and help the executive or IP manager make the right strategic decisions.
“All organizations that have to manage or enhance an intellectual property portfolio can potentially be interested in our services.”
Can the quality of intellectual property be a factor in the valuation of a company?
IP has become ‘capital’, in the literal sense of the word, and is no longer just a regulatory edifice serving as a shield against counterfeiting: it’s one of the best ways to differentiate, win markets, and extend your reach. It is an instrument of economic and commercial conquest and has also become a recognized vector of communication. Before the 1980s, a company’s value was 80% tangible and 20% intangible. Today, 75% to 90% of the market capitalization of listed companies is made up of their intangible assets, of which a significant part is Intellectual Property. It therefore has a direct impact on their valuation. The stakes are just as high for an SME as they are for a large Group.
Which organizations are interested in your services?
All organizations that need to manage or monetize an IP portfolio potentially may be interested in our services. Our initial clients were biotech startups and SMEs who fully understood the importance of IP as the very foundation of their businesses, for seeking partners and investors. However, we quickly attracted larger SMEs and intermediate-sized companies that already have a portfolio ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand IP titles and want to evolve their management approach by digitizing it more collaboratively. Other companies have joined us, using solutions that have become too complex and sophisticated for their needs or compared to their existing teams. Our clients also include public and private research organizations and technology transfer offices, which face challenges due to the large number of stakeholders (joint research units, co-applicants, agents) and for whom generic ERPs do not offer sufficiently dedicated business solutions. Since the recent evolution of our solution towards managing all intangible assets and Intellectual Property rights, we are now also attracting large groups. Some of them indeed want to opt for an efficient and much more economical solution, especially as we are currently working on connecting several complementary services to PI Planner.
What sets you apart from your competitors?
Our DNA is to offer pragmatic and accessible management solutions to organizations holding Intellectual Property rights, regardless of the size of their portfolio. What sets us apart:
• PI Planner meets the needs of decision-makers within the company. We offer our clients a carefully considered set of essential features for proactive management of an IP asset portfolio. This selection of features contributes to the ergonomics and user-friendliness of the software.
• We are a challenger in the IP management software market, with a particularly attractive cost-to-features ratio. The cost of PI Planner is around 1% of the cost of managing an IP portfolio. Our pricing is transparent and predictable, based solely on the number of titles held by companies.
• PI Planner is a solution natively developed for the SaaS model, allowing centralized and secure access to all portfolio data for an unlimited number of users.
• Finally, PI Planner is constantly evolving. We maintain an agile structure to allow rapid adaptation of our solution to the needs of our clients.
What additional services are offered?
PI Motion supports its clients with initial data integration services into PI Planner, data updates, and training on software usage. We also offer specific consulting and coaching services for IP portfolio management.
Is your offering adapted to the new context of the digital economy? How will digitization affect intellectual property management?
As with other professions requiring the aggregation and sharing of large amounts of data (such as customer relationship management, logistics, etc.), the opportunities offered by digital tools for IP management allow for time savings, smoother and more secure information sharing, reduction of physical media, and better monitoring of the deadlines inherent in the procedures for granting IP titles. This results in improved responsiveness, cost optimization, more relevant decisions taking into account all business dimensions. This is especially important as the volumes of data to be considered are constantly increasing. PI Planner offers a solution to the challenges of collaboration in this new environment by promoting secure information sharing and allowing managers to easily coordinate their teams digitally in the absence of physical meetings.
Will the health crisis change the way intellectual property is managed?
Just like the majority of players in the economic sector, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Intellectual Property professionals to change their way of working. Remote work has become the norm, and the solutions implemented in this very particular context have paved the way for new tools and operating methods. Paradoxically, companies are forced to reduce their investments, and PI Motion has adapted to this context by offering an optimized solution in terms of functionality, cost-effectiveness, and cost rationalization. Indeed, we have seen a number of companies opt for PI Planner either because they were under-equipped or because they wished to move towards less sophisticated software that better meets their operational needs and budgetary constraints. History will undoubtedly remember this crisis as the period when the digital transformation of companies suddenly accelerated. The economic recovery will offer great opportunities to those who have continued to master the management of their intangible assets and make the right decisions. So, it’s time to rethink and optimize the management of your Intellectual Property!
Source : MEDEF