Rembrandts in the attic

COMMENT

Whether you like it or not, Antiques Roadshow is a hard television programme to channel surf past. There’s something strangely compelling about someone finding a priceless painting in their attic or stuffed behind the water heater.

Before you start ripping up the floorboards, many management teams might be better dusting off past R&D efforts to see if they own valuable IP assets that are currently lost off the balance sheet.

The past 24 months the US has seen at least six intellectual property transactions of a billion dollars or more.

Ageing or distressed companies such as Kodak, Nortel and Motorola Mobility have realised that intellectual property can have enormous value. In Nortel’s case the sale of its patent portfolio netted the beleaguered company $US4.5 billion, effectively valuing it at three times the rest of the company (roughly US$750,000 per patent).

In August 2011 Google acquired Motorola’s Mobility business unit (after reporting five straight quarters of losses) for $US12.5 billion, a move motivated almost entirely by Motorola’s treasure trove of 17,000 patents.

Fairytales
You could say that this is the stuff of fairytales but, like the proverbial retiree from Swansea with her 16th century Charles II tea set, it actually does happen. In fact, there’s a whole book about it, called fittingly Rembrandts in the Attic by Kevin Rivette and Davie Kline. 

It charts how companies (and individuals) can own intellectual property assets – not just patents but trademarks, copyrights and confidential information – that are extremely valuable but they are often unaware of their existence, let alone true value.

One of the best examples of this phenomenon comes, in fact, from New Zealand.

In the early 2000s a little-known New Zealand software company developed what would come to be an industry changing technology. It filed a patent application over the area and attempted to commercialise the technology but for a variety of reasons (not the least of which that it was simply too early) it was unsuccessful.

Management kept the patent application alive and it was eventually granted. At this stage they approached EverEdge IP and over a four-month period we negotiated the sale of the patent for an eight-figure sum (tens of millions of US dollars).

The sale marked the highest price ever paid for a single US patent. The company netted $45 for every $1 invested into it. That is a venture capital type return for a company that had otherwise stalled.

Well positioned
New Zealand firms with their knack for outside-the-box thinking (which tends to produce early, and therefore more valuable IP assets) are well positioned to take advantage of the increasingly liquid market in intellectual property. 

This includes not just start-ups and backyard inventors but also medium and large corporates which often have little awareness of potential unrealised value sitting on or off the balance sheet.

The irony is that many of these companies record low-value items such as chairs, desks and laptops in their fixed asset register but fail to identify assets that are potentially far more valuable – the intellectual property derived from R&D, innovation activities or ideas from the bright minds of staff or contractors.

However, the mood is changing. Smart management teams have come to realise that many businesses do produce intellectual property and that while these assets can be highly valuable they need to take proactive steps to extract that value.

EverEdge IP acts for a number of New Zealand companies selling highly valuable intellectual property derived from previous R&D and innovation efforts which fell outside of core business or that shareholders and management were initially unaware of. 

It is worth noting also that the Crown, New Zealand’s largest investor in R&D, probably has a Rembrandt or two gathering dust in its attic, given the roughly $800 million it has invested into public R&D since the formation of the CRIs in early 1990s.

Getting them out of the attic is whole other story, however.

On Wednesday, August 14, in Auckland, Paul Adams, CEO of EverEdge IP, and Bruce Sheppard, partner at Gilligan Sheppard, are delivering a major seminar on how to identify high-value intangible assets in your business.  

For details, contact info@everedgeip.com.

Paul Adams is CEO of EverEdge IP, one of the world’s leading intangible asset and technology commercialisation firm. He has been named one of IAM’s top global IP strategists and was the recipient of the Outstanding IP Leader Award 2012, China.