Mergers & Acquisitions - Innography

Mergers & Acquisitions

Intellectual property can be an organization's most valuable asset and as such is of high importance in technology-driven mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. Finding the right IP portfolio to acquire is therefore a crucial decision but one that can be difficult based upon the limited information typically available to a corporate development team.

Innography enables M&A teams to perform in-depth company analysis that can mean the difference between success and failure in deals. By correlating patents with corporate financial records and key industry data, Innography gives you the ability to view patents by category, filter by revenues and quickly narrow results using other business metrics. With intuitive visualizations, Innography graphically depicts meaningful financial, competitive, licensing and other business landscapes.

Equally important in this process is the need to perform thorough due diligence. However, the time critical nature of acquisitions often lead M&A teams to conduct rushed and cursory reviews of IP opportunities and threats, which can make IP valuation and risk assessment more difficult for your organization. Using Innography will enable you to quickly identify critical IP issues that could affect the decision to acquire as well as the valuation of the company being considered. Many of these insights would be impossible without the capabilities of Innography.

Identify Potential Acquisition Targets

With the ability to conduct sophisticated analysis of market, company and industry, Innography provides you insight to the entire patent landscape. Through a variety of correlated visual maps and data sources, you can rapidly evaluate exactly what patent classifications and which companies present opportunities. To streamline research, Innography also has multiple algorithms to reduce manual processing and analysis for portfolio evalutation, including:

• Inventory, map and assess competitive landscapes of merger and acquisition candidates
• Map emerging landscapes in a particular industry
• Identify potential "gems" inside corporate intellectual property portfolios

Patent Portfolio Due Diligence

Patent ownership is complex and it is critical to have an accurate inventory of what the acquisition target owns. Innography reduces the complexity in analyzing patent ownership, allowing you to identify potentially millions of dollars of lost value. Innography can be utilized to conduct due diligence on an organization's IP portfolio to identify:

• Areas of IP risk in a company's portfolio due to chain of title issues
• Which patents a company currently owns or doesn't own (taking acquisitions and divestitures into account)
• Which patents are still active (taking abandonments into account)
• If the company has patent coverage in key geographic markets you are targeting

Risk Assessment

The level of risk being taken by acquiring a company can be assessed by using Innography to look at activity in the market you are entering such as:

• Identifying the patents most often associated with patent infringement litigation.
• Monitoring NPE (non-practicing entity) activity to help manage risk and anticipate future threats.
• Identifying if an acquisition target’s patents are encumbered by FRAND licensing obligations, which can limit your ability to control the market and dictate licensing terms.
• Identifying if there are competitors that may attempt to block product development through patent litigation.