What do Companies Need to Tell Us about their Intellectual Property Portfolios?

New book Intellectual Property, Finance and Corporate Governance will upend your understanding of why companies need to communicate more about how they manage corporate IP portfolios and their strategy for delivering shareholder value. It is unique, the first book to apply corporate governance principles to corporate ownership of monopolistic intellectual property (IP) rights that protect innovation and creativity.

Author, Dr Janice Denoncourt of Nottingham Law School, argues that IP rights have evolved from being “a little pool to a big ocean” of corporate value and that corporate governance needs to respond to society’s rising expectations of directors and boards.

Denoncourt reflects on the philosophies and principles that underpin debates on the key corporate governance principles of disclosure and transparency. Patents, mini-case studies and an original business triage-style model for assessing corporate IP information, strategy and disclosures illustrate the gaps corporate governance theory needs to address. She  proactively tells the fascinating story of the pressure for corporate boards to disclose more information about a company’s valuable IP in traditional formats such as the accounts and the annual report.

Adopting a combined theoretical and practical analysis, Janice puts corporate IP ownership into context illuminating how corporate investment in R&D and IP rights contributes to the bottom line, the challenge of managing portfolios of IP rights, while advocating for the need to ensure boards of directors are accountable for IP management and strategy decisions. Policy reforms are identified and clearly explained.

Focusing on the common law tradition of corporate governance in England and Wales, intangibles and IP reporting developments in Denmark, Germany, Japan and the United States are also explored. The book, divided into three parts, is a readable tour of an important underside of the intangible economy. Denoncourt dissects complex technical legal, finance and IP rights issues in a way that the educated generalist will understand, while providing deeper insight into the corporate world in which we live and invest.

This new book is a timely contribution to the legal and economic literature for readers interested in what lies behind the headlines that dominate corporate scandals such the recent debacle involving American firm, Theranos and its patented blood testing technology.  The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stated that the company engaged in “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business and financial performance.”

About the Author Dr J Denoncourt:

Janice is a Senior Lecturer at the Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom where teaches IP law and Company law.  She is the Editor of the School’s annual legal research publication, the Nottingham Law Journal. Janice was a British Council Chevening Scholar (2002), completed LLM degrees in Intellectual Property Law (2002) and Intellectual Property Law, Policy & Management (2003) and received her PhD (2015) from the University of Nottingham. Before turning to academe, Janice worked as a corporate lawyer and held positions with Minter Ellison Perth, in-house counsel for a publicly listed Western Australian mining technology company and Legal Affairs Manager for a private UK company.