Development of audit system for intellectual property management excellence

Intellectual property (IP) management has been widely accepted as an important topic to support the technological innovation. In order to effectively and efficiently implement IP management, it is more practical to firstly focus on the most important aspects which, in turn, provide immediate beneficial results to allow organizations to further implementing other aspects by allocating more resources. The authors propose an IP management excellence audit system that breaks down the complicated IP management practices into a list of enabling criteria and the IP management performance in various criteria can be measured in details. The enabling criteria are the critical success factors to good IP management system and practice. Analytic hierarchy process approach is used to determine the relative importance among the identified criteria in the IP management excellence audit system. The evidential reasoning approach is adopted to develop an expert assessment tool to carry out the audit of organizations' performance in IP management. Based on the audit results, organizations will know the strength and weakness of their current IP management practice and can allocate resources and efforts in priority area for improvement. The authors have validated the developed system and tool in HK-Guangdong (HK-GD) based manufacturing organizations with satisfactory outcome. The audit results are helpful to provide top management facts and information to develop action plans for improving IP management. This paper presents the proposed IP audit system and the industrial case study with the development of an expert assessment tool. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.