As CEO, managing innovations and driving growth is your primary responsibility. But, the critical question is how do you go about achieving it? To drive innovations and improve profitability you need to understand the IP portfolio, spend in building and upkeeping the portfolio and most importantly the return on investment. Also, deploying continuous evaluation model to churn incremental and radical innovations improves effectiveness and accelerates growth.

Another challenge Chief Innovation Officers or CXO's face is to align IP Strategy with Business strategy. One of the key aspects to focus is on assessing the IP asset base with the current corporate goals and objectives, evaluate gaps in patent families, and identify areas of misalignment. A quick analysis of key technology areas reveals high value assets and gives you opportunity to divest non-revenue generating IP assets. As part of the IP strategy chalks out steps to enforce global IP protection for defense. Gain insights into competitive intelligence to drive competitive advantage. Prioritizing these, boosts organization success further.

Formulating such a comprehensive strategy is not easy. Only 12 percent of the manufacturers, for example are 'very effective' at determining product profitability. This leaves the door for improvement wide open. Addressing the above aspects would accelerate the promotion of innovation and growth.

Now, looking from a start-up perspective, a million dollar question is to file for patent or not to? But, how do you determine this? A simple and straight forward way to deal with is to question as to why you want to file patent? Consider the benefits you are going to gain in terms of revenue, marketing advantage, industry control or influence or using IP as bargaining chips. Then, think of the patent costs. If benefits outweigh the constraints, it makes sense to invest, protect and monetize.

Assessing Patent Costs ahead of time is important factor for IP Financial planning, Budgeting and Forecasting. Based on the cost estimate you can make the critical decision-to file or NOT to file. If you are a start-up you think twice, thrice or several times before you decide 'yes'. There is a strong tendency to drop or differ the filing, primarily because of cost considerations. But, such decisions come back to bite you. So, make decisions considering all facts.