Intellectual property risk “misunderstood”
Global organisations are largely failing to understand the intellectual property (IP) risks facing their organisations, according to Marsh.
In the 2011 Intellectual Property Survey undertaken by Marsh and Liberty International Underwriters, three-quarters of respondents were unable to quantify the proportion of their firms’ value that could be attributed to intangible assets or goodwill.
This is despite almost 70% of firms identifying the protection of IP as a crucial incentive to innovation in their firms.
In addition, the majority of firms said that IP was not specifically included in their risk management programmes, and only 16% of respondents bought insurance coverage for the main types of IP risks.
Liberty International vice president strategic assets, Matthew Hogg, comments: “Failure to provide adequate protection for IP has the potential to threaten an organisation’s survival.”
He adds: “The survey makes clear that firms in the US are taking this threat more seriously than their European counterparts; this could impact global competitiveness.”
In this respect, the report highlights several differences between the US and Europe as follows:
Over 70% of respondents in the US stated that patents were of high or medium importance, compared to just 56% of European companies.
75% of European companies perceived the risk of patent invalidity proceedings to be low, against only 37% of US companies.
European respondents perceived the risk of IP litigation in the US to be higher than their actual US counterparts, with 33.3% of Europeans seeing it as high risk, against only 15.8% of US respondents.
Category: Business Insurance News, Insurance News, Marsh News
Visited 1958 times, 2 so far today
Comments (0)
Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed
There are no comments yet. Why not be the first to speak your mind.