August 21, 2025

 Dhananjay Das

 Abhinav Mahajan

innovation artificial intelligence ip management intellectual property

Many – perhaps even most – companies are sitting on goldmines of patents that have yet to be transformed into revenue or strategic weapons. Unless a patent is protecting critical products or delivering value via licensing deals, these assets remain archived, resource-draining artefacts instead of being value-adding assets. And without the right tools and expert guidance, the situation only gets worse.

What’s the (IP) Problem?

Patent portfolio management has been a largely administrative endeavour. Many times, it involves simply maintaining a list of patents in Excel sheets or databases, tagged by technology area or product line. While this method ensures basic tracking and organisation, it typically lacks strategic depth. Conventional docketing tools can tell you when a patent is expiring or which technology bucket it falls into, but they rarely offer insights into how the portfolio aligns with broader business objectives.

As a result, maintaining an inactive portfolio makes that untapped IP a net loss that silently depletes budgets without delivering a return. Worse still, and as is the case with most companies, as that dormant portfolio grows, the administrative expense grows, and with it, so does the net loss. The problem intensifies once manual management of the portfolio becomes impractical.

What if portfolio management looked beyond tags and expiry dates and instead examined a portfolio through a business lens? This would transform IP from a static list into a dynamic asset driven not just by protection but also by business and strategic potential. Is this approach possible?

The Challenge: Too Much IP, Too Little Insight

Unlocking value from a portfolio requires a cost-effective, scalable approach to assessing the strategic relevance and value of every single piece of your IP. Until very recently, a key problem has been achieving positive ROI on the effort of sifting through a large portfolio. If you lead IP at a technology-driven company, chances are you’re managing hundreds, if not thousands of patents. Some align with current products. Others map to competitor technologies. But finding what’s valuable and what’s dispensable? That’s a massive task if done manually, and traditional approaches to such reviews are slow, subjective, and unscalable. So much for positive ROI!

But, with the advent of AI, those days are over. Reimagined, AI-powered portfolio management – such as Elevate’s F3 Analysis™ described below – overcomes those hurdles to deliver lower costs while surfacing licensing opportunities and facilitating an agile, future-ready IP strategy.

The Solution: F3 Analysis™ = Fundamental. Future. Fringe.

The driving concept of F3 Analysis™ Framework is to focus an organisation’s IP activity on what delivers the greatest business and strategic value. To do so, the F3 approach classifies every asset based on strategic relevance and specifies actions for each of three classifications:

These aren’t standard categories you’ll find in most market tools, but they are deeply relevant for IP teams looking to create impact. The F3 classification scheme bridges the gap between legal and business strategy, enabling patent portfolios to inform decisions around R&D investments, market entry, licensing, and more. It is a simple yet powerful framework that helps you focus on the 20% of your portfolio that drives 80% of your outcomes.

What Makes F3 Analysis™ Smarter? AI Scoring + Human Expertise

What sets F3 Analysis™ apart is a hybrid AI+human expertise approach that uses automation to optimise IP strategy:

Step 1: AI Scoring

Each patent is scored along three dimensions:

• Q Score – Patent quality (citations, claim scope, family size, etc.)
• A1 Score – Relevance to your product lines
• A2 Score – Relevance to competitor or third-party products

These scores are weighted differently based on an individual business’s objectives: cost-cutting, monetisation, product protection, or future planning.

Step 2: Expert Validation

Here, patent strategists manually review outliers from the AI analysis:

• High-potential assets are prepared for claim charting or licensing
• Low-potential ones are shortlisted for pruning
• Future-facing patents are assessed for claim shaping and prosecution strategy

Case Study: From Static IP Management to Multi-Million-Dollar Impact

F3 Analysis™ has consistently demonstrated superior results and achieved what, practically speaking, would be impossible using traditional approaches. Consider a global eCommerce business managing 10,000+ patents but struggling to extract strategic value from them. Its existing approach tracked assets but failed to reveal how patents across diverse business lines, technologies, and jurisdictions supported licensing, litigation, or innovation goals.

F3 Analysis™ helped them:

• Reclassify the portfolio into Fundamental¹, Fringe², and Future³ tiers and evaluate each asset for technical strength, market relevance, and legal robustness
• Identify high-value patents, develop 2,800+ litigation-ready claim charts, and accelerate enforcement and licensing workflows
• Prune over 200 low-value patents, avoiding multi-million-dollar costs and surfacing monetisation opportunities
• Align R&D-driven filings with business priorities, resulting in 250+ strategic prosecutions, 80+ new grants, and 60+ active applications in growth areas

The outcome? 85% cost savings versus US-based vendors, accelerated decision-making, and a strengthened innovation pipeline.

Read detailed case study here

The Bigger Picture: IP as a Business Lever

The F3 approach also integrates competitive mapping, helping organisations understand how their IP compares to competitors and where they hold white space or need reinforcement:

This highlights another compelling advantage of F3 Analysis™: its ability to transform static and dormant IP portfolios into active, evolving toolkits for near- and long-term strategic growth.

Unprecedented Results for Maximum IP Impact

A new era of AI-powered portfolio management has arrived. With it, the traditional hurdles to unlocking the full value of IP portfolios are easily scaled, with lower costs, greater monetisation, and an optimised IP strategy for years to come.

For a one-on-one in-depth presentation on details of Elevate’s AI-powered F3 Analysis™, including

• technical details of the F3 Analysis™ methodology and its three categories
• the types of reports it generates and insights it provides
• a sample timeline for a hypothetical portfolio of 1,000 patent families
• how it applies to your patent portfolio

please click here.