Step 3: Plan, Keep filings up to date, monitor, and look for opportunities

Life goes on and things happen, even after your IP has been protected.

Don’t take your eyes off it

Once their IP is protected, inventors and organizations are often distracted and take their eyes off what all that effort was for. They miss changes in the business landscape, or even the reason they created the intellectual property in the first place. Plans to monitor for changes and opportunities protect the integrity and the future value of your IP.

Registering a claim is not the end of the work.⁠^[1] Beyond answering requests from the registration offices, you have to respond to changes in the business and technology landscape. Leaving everything alone is like leaving a produce department untouched for a month and expecting the produce to stay fresh and the building to stay standing. If the building burns down while no one is watching, the produce and the building are both gone; so are your IP and its protection. Things change, and IP can need updates to stay relevant.

Keep filings current, and watch the market

Keep your eye on the ball. Good intellectual property needs renewals, ordinary registrations and filings.⁠^[1]⁠^[2] Watch the marketplace for infringements, including of your trademarks: failing to monitor the market can make your trademark or other IP less enforceable.⁠^[2] It can also cause you or your organization to miss opportunities for income, and new developments or enhancements built on your idea or IP.

One strategy is to appoint someone to monitor your IP portfolio for opportunities: inside or outside representatives, chosen according to the value of the potential markets in your niche or vertical. Weighing the cost against the benefit is straightforward. Take the time for a quick review of your market, through a professional or through your own web searches.

Let your networks do some of the watching

Networks, including social networks, can help with monitoring. Knowing how to bring this into your social community can make all the difference, and gives you a cost-effective way to find out who is viewing and using your idea or invention. Use a service that monitors articles on the internet, so you can see whether your idea is being talked about and who is interested. It may also bring you licensing business. See building IP networks for knowledge and reach.

Many ideas and inventions had a make-or-break moment that turned on attention to the marketplace. Plan, and make sure you are not missing real opportunities.

Before and after Step 3

Previous step

Step 2: Protect

Is the idea unique? If it is, you need to decide how to build a framework that protects it.

Next step

Step 4: Policies

Once you have a plan, put protocols in place, personally or across the company, for managing your newly protected IP.

Protecting value, all the way to monetization

Steps 4 to 7: Policies, access, agreements, ownership

These are the important steps to monetization. Create policies around your intellectual property. Understand what access means and how to protect it. Create agreements that protect access and value. Document ownership.

Steps 8 to 10: Audits, infringement, documentation

Audit your intellectual property and the status of each asset. Understand what infringement means, and the best way to approach it, whether you are infringing or being infringed. Documentation will ultimately be the most important piece of the monetization process: think of it as a documented audit trail.

References

a b Keeping your registration alive. United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
a b Trademark. Wikipedia.
↑ RIF Industries: Technology and intellectual property. Maynard L. Dokken, the record. maynardldokken.com/rif-industries/#technology

Every source above was opened and checked on 3 November 2026.