Licensing IP
Licensing is one possible route to scale a business along a growth journey. But is it the right one for your business?
- If you have are developing great hardware IP, but have little or no capacity or experience for manufacturing, should you gear-up to produce solutions in-house or licence your IP to others for manufacture instead? Or a combination of both?
- If your technology includes hardware, then the implications for your business case of funding capital investment for manufacturing expansion in-house is going to be central to your current and potential investors’ view of the attractiveness of your company as an investment.
- There are several different ways to approach licensing and multiple business models
- NovAzure helps clients to tailor and prioritise their business models and the commercial terms of licences.
Control of licensee’s use of your IP
- You may have concerns about the risk of a licensee stealing your secrets or putting them to a use without your permission. The risk of IP leakage must be managed.
- NovAzure advises clients about the range commercial terms that are appropriate in order that the licence you grant to a licensee is used for the purposes intended in the manner intended for the fees intended.
- Establishing the commercial terms of a licence is a negotiation between the parties. NovAzure seeks to enable a licence to benefit to all parties by providing clarity and alignment around the both the intention and the wording of a licence, because it is a critical step to a sound working relationship based upon trust and shared vision. NovAzure can facilitate the negotiation to a good outcome.
- Once the commercial terms are drafted, then a legal expert may put them into the correct legal form for a contract.
Licence fees: How to price licences
This is a common question that we are asked at NovAzure again and again. As with all other ways to charge for products and services, there must be a price for a licence and NovAzure can help you.
The NovAzure team can explain the methods to value a licence and recommend which one is appropriate to value a particular licence in order to set prices.
NovAzure has an evolving pricing practice, with proprietary modelling approaches to compare the value (total cost of ownership) of different, competing technologies and implications for pricing.
When to consult a lawyer about licensing IP
- NovAzure does not provide legal advice or advice that is a substitute for legal advice.
- We work alongside legal experts to develop commercial terms for licenses that meet the business requirements and then with legal experts to build the commercial intentions into a legal framework:
- This means that you benefit from maximising the right expertise for the right tasks and avoid unnecessarily high legal expenses.
- We can provide no-obligation details of legal firms that we already have experience of working with in this way, or we can work with your preferred legal advisers.
