Skip to main content

Deloitte IP 360 Survey

Understanding where Intellectual Property (IP) and Intangibles drive value across the business for multiple stakeholders

Adobe Acrobat Sign and Deloitte Legal Services
Adapting to an evolving market

At Deloitte we are fortunate to work with clients across all industry sectors and engage with a wide range of stakeholders within clients’ businesses of all sizes in the public and private sector across the globe.

Over the years we have seen an increasing interest in the professionalization of IP Management and a recognition that IP rights can drive competitive advantage, increase corporate and shareholder value, and enhance profitability through licensing, price performance and benefitting from IP-related government incentives.

Intangibles, including IP such as patents, copyrights, data, and trade secrets continue to have significant impact on business value and as portfolios grow and scale, their relevance across the business increases. Multiple business functions have a vested interest in the creation, maintenance, protection, utilization, and reporting of intangible assets.

To understand how companies are currently managing and leveraging their IP, Deloitte has created its first-ever IP 360 Survey. In collaboration with commercial IP Advisory, IP Legal, Tax (including Transfer Pricing) and business strategy experts from across Deloitte, we curated an extensive questionnaire and interviewed a wide range of IP practitioners to capture current trends within IP departments. The results of this survey illustrate how IP and the wider range of intangibles are managed, valued, and communicated across the business.


Top insights:

Emerging themes from Deloitte’s 2023 IP 360 research.

The IP departments at many companies are proving to be highly diligent and adept at the strategic capture and management of registered IP assets and are mindful of the strategic impact of non-registered intangible assets. Linking value to intangibles to meet the needs of internal stakeholders appears to be an area for potential improvement.

These are some of the key themes that emerged from Deloitte’s 2023 IP 360 survey, which included responses from a global network of 57 senior IP leaders across a wide range of businesses from startups to large multinational companies.

Mature approaches to IP management – Across all participating companies we see a mature and comprehensive approach to managing registered IP rights, consistent with all sizes of company and portfolio.

Impact of data and trade secrets – There is recognition that portfolio composition is changing with data, trade secrets, and know-how having important business value, but there is no consistency or common approach to managing these assets.

IP silos – The IP function is an island. There is great alignment with reporting to the general counsel, but wider C-suite engagement with strategy leaders, CIO, and Tax are not happening with as much frequency. Everyone has an IP strategy, but they are kept within the IP department.

Commercialization behaviours – Exploitation of intangible assets is low in terms of commercialization and leveraging incentives and optimizing transfer pricing. There are untapped cash and revenue generating opportunities that can be unlocked if organizational silos can be broken down and the IP-Tax knowledge gap can be bridged.

Did you find this useful?

Thanks for your feedback

If you would like to help improve Deloitte.com further, please complete a 3-minute survey

Our thinking