Sophisticated software can help today's businesses manage their IP portfolios on a global Scale. Simon Hughes, Antoinette Lachat and Maurus Schreyvogel explain how using CPA Global Memotech 2004 has helped Novartis achieve tangible business goals.

Most businesses have well planned procedures for registering and enforcing their IP assets, particularly if they operate on a global scale, and Novartis is no exception. Since its formation in 1996, with the merger of the Swiss companies, Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz, Novartis has become a world leader in the fields of pharmaceuticals, consumer health, generics, eye-care and animal health.

As Novartis’s mission statement makes clear, the company wants to be recognised for ‘having a positive impact on people’s lives’ and for ‘contributing to society’; for that reason it was named Novartis from the Latin novae artes (‘new skills’). And if the company ethos sounds too good to be true, it isn’t – in 2005, Novartis was included in a listing of the ‘Global 100 most sustainable corporations in the world’, receiving high marks for demonstrating sustainability premium and strong performance on environmental, social and governance issues.

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, the Novartis Group employs more than 80,000 people in its pharmaceutical, consumer health and generics divisions in over 140 countries. It organises all its IP through a central Corporate Intellectual Property department (CIP), but the 236 IP specialists who work in the team are split over 10 key locations, including Basel and New Jersey. They manage and maintain a portfolio of well over 100,000 individual IP cases, comprising patents, trademarks and domain names – a portfolio as large as it is global.

The figures are, as you might expect, massive. In 2004, the Group’s businesses achieved sales of US$28.2 billion and a net income of US$5.8 billion. Strong corporate branding and astute management of intangible assets have also paid dividends; in 2005, Novartis was ranked for the first time in the top 100 best global brands, with a brand value of US$7.746 billion.

A global IP strategy
Today the IP division works closely with the R&D and marketing departments at all stages of product development, but it wasn’t always so. ‘Prior to mid-2003, Novartis didn’t see much reason to evolve the way it looked after its IP,’ says Simon Hughes, head of the Services group within CIP. ‘The department was operating in a long-established and well-understood way. There were no urgent demands for more, better or different services. Nor were there commonly understood views of what we needed to do to become “world class”.

‘New management pushed a major shift in the way CIP operated,’ he explains. ‘We worked to become a valued strategic partner to R&D projects, product development teams and marketing, and our work changed as a result. We needed to show cost and portfolio transparency, not simply at a boardroom level, but also to deliver and empower people, foster a global working environment and a performance management culture. This had implications for the way we worked and the software we used.’

Previously, CIP was using three differing systems to manage its IP: patent management was based on an in-house system, but US cases were administered using an external package and CPA Global Memotech was used for trademarks. ‘Running three systems simultaneously had negative effects on our time and resources,’ says Simon. ‘We could see that commercial software packages offered significantly extended functionality that could help save time and improve efficiency. Integration with MS Office tools, reporting and analysis, workflow management, integration between departments and services… all these were missing. It became increasingly obvious that we needed to place one system at a global level to manage our global portfolio.’