Technology Licensing 

To improve licensing performance, we help companies organize effectively for technology licensing. Transferring technology is a complex process, and the licensor often needs to actively support the technology adoption at the licensee. These managerial challenges underscore the importance of organizing technology licensing activities effectively. Companies can outsource their tasks, work and projects to us. We work with:

• Companies that are actively seeking to license technology often fail to reap benefits from their efforts. They have difficulty identifying licensing opportunities and potential licensees. 

• Companies that may own a potential technological solution for specific problems, yet it faces the challenge of identifying other profitable applications, which may be in different industries. 

To overcome the managerial difficulties inherent in actively sourcing and licensing technology, companies and organizations can leverage CEC Global to: 

1. Identify licensing opportunities, implement licensing deals, and find key contacts for all issues concerning licensing;

2. Extend a company’s knowledge of potential technology applications to other industries;

3. Source contacts and build strategic alliances with other organizations to transfer knowledge and technology;

4. Join project-based local technology licensing teams in a specific technology field or in specific market. We pool the capabilities of various individuals from different functional and business fields to complement companies formal licensing structure, which are relatively limited in many companies;

5. Once a licensing opportunity develops, companies can join a local technology transfer team to effect the technology transfer to the licensee. The local team coordinates the contributions of experts from different business and functional units, such as financial, legal, marketing, R&D etc.

6. Support high-ranking employees such as Chief Technology Officers or the Heads of Intellectual Property, to promote licensing throughout the organization.

7. Draw on the participation of a wide variety of experts, especially financial, legal, marketing etc., to identify licensing opportunities and implement licensing deals. Even if companies have a dedicated licensing department, these dedicated employees cannot conduct all the relevant tasks throughout the licensing process. 

Benefits 

Some companies  gain significantly greater monetary or strategic benefits from licensing than other companies; these companies adopt more organizational practices conducive to effective licensing. They capture additional value from their technologies by licensing their intellectual property to other organizations, including direct competitors. Outward transfer of a company’s own proprietary technology has only recently become an important dimension of corporate strategy, as part of a trend toward open innovation. 

Some companies license technology primarily to achieve additional revenues generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual royalties. Other companies license technology primarily to achieve strategic benefits, such as establishing a technology standard in an industry, entering new markets or cross-licensing to gain access to external knowledge. Despite these potential benefits, licensing also involves substantial risks. In particular, a company that transfers its “corporate assets” - in other words, competitively relevant technology - may weaken its strategic position by strengthening potential competitors. For that reason, many companies traditionally have been reluctant to transfer technology.

Open innovation can involve both bringing knowledge from outside into the corporation and also transferring technologies from within the corporation to external partners. By licensing their proprietary technology, companies attempt to achieve a sufficient return on R&D, and licensing often goes beyond a marginal activity involving residual technology. Managers should not oversimplify the realization of licensing opportunities by excessively focusing on open licensing strategies rather than on their implementation. To successfully implement open innovation strategies that involve licensing technologies from within the organization, companies need to organize effectively for licensing.

Approach

We deliver different levels of proficiency in organizing for licensing serving 4 types of companies:

1. Companies that have pioneered the trend towards active technology licensing, and have established a highly proficient licensing organization. In particular, the company differs from other companies in the comparatively large number of dedicated licensing employees, who usually form a separate department; their main task is the identification of licensing opportunities.

2. Companies that have established relatively proficient licensing organizations in recent years and seem likely to further increase their licensing activity in the future; actively attempts to identify licensing opportunities rather than waiting for inquiries from potential licensees; has a limited number of dedicated licensing employees, who are usually part of the intellectual property department; has a specific project organization for identifying licensing opportunities, and the licensing management is supported by some high-ranking individual manager(s), who serve as informal champions of the licensing activities; has a considerable licensing activity, but is often still in the relatively early stages of establishing an active licensing approach.

3. Companies that have become aware of the benefits from licensing but are not actively pursuing; instead, they are relatively passive; typically, licensing deals arise in response to external inquiries and are usually limited to internally unused technologies; have hardly any full-time licensing staff, and they also do not actively use project teams to discover licensing opportunities; consequently, licensing is still an occasional activity.

4. Companies that have relatively little concern for licensing, attention is primarily fixed on their product business. The clear focus is on protecting their competitive advantage by strictly limiting outward technology transfer. Consistent with this closed innovation strategy, these companies lack dedicated licensing employees. Licensing deals are very rare in this group, and if one occurs, it is managed as a unique event.

Commercialization

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