Thursday, May 7, 2009

Technology licensing vs. Product licensing

License are granted for business, products and technology. Business licensing is only concerned with manufacturing, sales and marketing of goods. IP professional are not much concern with this class of licensing. Product licensing relates to transactions that enable a buyer to duplicate and produce molecule or a device that has already been proven by the seller. In this kind of situations, the buyer will need essential surroundings to make profit from the license.
Technology licensing in itself a huge field, actually deals with licensing of non-tangible property rights generated by R&D activity a company and in most of the cases protected by one or another kind of IP. This kind of transactions mainly designate transactions for pre-commercials designs, data, R&D concepts, business plans, method of manufacturing and patents covering them. Technology licensing is becoming an increasingly important transaction category.
As we discussed, technology rights are usually expressed in three important form of IP such as patent, trade secret and copyrights. One of the requisite for technology licensing is technology valuation. It would be assumed that IP protection exists when considering the valuation of technology. Hence, we actually value IP. The extent and strength of IP protection are dimensions of a technology valuation.

Measure of R&D, patenting and licensing is available through Association of University technology managers (AUTM) http://www.autm.org/. But off course, there are some issues with technology licensing. In technology licensing, there is no past history. The issue of forecasting play a major role, all data needs to be developed from sketch. Over all uncertainty in technology licensing is higher then product or business licensing. This difference can be narrowed by skillful due diligence and analysis.