مدیر آی پی:DSS مبتنی بر میکرو کامپیوتر برای مدیریت مالکیت معنوی

We describe a decision support system (DSS) that was developed for the management of the costs associated with the payment of fees to protect the intellectual property (IP) of organizations involved in research and development. IPManager is a decision support system that the authors developed to aid managers of IP in creating or improving IP registration and maintenance strategies and to enable them to use their experience and preferences. The system is currently in use at AgResearch, which is a New Zealand-based institute conducting research into agriculture. A case study is reported discussing the decision environment that motivated the development of the system.

As the largest Crown Research Institute in New Zealand, AgResearch provides knowledge and best practice technology to pastoral agricultural industries. A strong focus on biotechnology and ecotechnology seeks to provide integrated life science solutions that create value for stakeholders and customers, wealth for New Zealand, and better health for all. At the beginning of 2000, 835 permanent staff operated from the Ruakura (Hamilton), Grasslands (Palmerston North), Wallaceville (Upper Hutt), Lincoln (Christchurch), and Invermay (Dunedin) campuses of AgResearch. Revenue for the year to June 2000 was $106 million. While contract research and development remains the cornerstone of AgResearch's business, a major imperative is to evolve into a life sciences company providing value-added high margin products and subsequent greater returns to New Zealand. This is to be achieved by increasing revenue through the acquisition or development and delivery of new products and technologies. This strategy necessitates the creation of new agricultural products whose related intellectual property (IP) ownership by AgResearch must be protected by patents, trademarks (TMs), and plant variety rights (PVRs). AgResearch (Ruakura) required a decision support system that would improve the organization's management of the costs it periodically incurs in maintaining its IP rights. We describe here the decision environment involved and also the development and use of the DSS, called IPManager, that was constructed for this purpose. A literature review of current research into the management of intellectual property is provided in the next section. In Section 3, we discuss the use of the DSS as an operations research (OR) tool. In 4 and 5, we discuss the decision environment at AgResearch and IPManager. In Section 6, a description of the development process and a discussion of the impact of the DSS is presented. We end the paper with some overall conclusions and a summary in Section 7.

We introduced a DSS, called IPManager, which is designed to address issues concerning the management of the events and fees that are incurred in the process of protecting intellectual property rights. IPManager seeks to assist financial planners and controllers at every step of this process. It does not automate the decision making process but helps planners by providing tools to create schedules, choose between plans, generate alternative plans, and to assess alternative plans with respect to given criteria. In summary, this paper shows that IP protection and the resulting fee payment management is a complex process, involving large amounts of subjective and objective information and requiring expert judgment. IPManager is designed to support research managers in coping with such complex situations.