Exploitation of Intellectual Property Portfolio in the Software Service Industry

Prosenjit Mondal, Manager Legal, Cognizant, India

Intellectual Property (IP) plays a crucial role in helping software service providers protect the technology assets, establish their brand, differentiate their products and services, and generate revenue from the assets. The development of solutions or services around these technology assets is of paramount interest to the software service providers. IP rights provide limited monopolistic right over their assets thus they provide a competitive edge over other companies. This paper proposes a framework for exploitation of these IP assets in the software services industries. The framework includes exploitation of IP from Research & Innovation, and software solutions provided to clients. The foundation of the framework is built on identification of potential IP and its ownership at the initial stage of the development to ensure that the business has rights to exploit the assets. The IP assets thus generated from the R&I project and solutions is combined into solutions accelerators for creating products, platforms and services, thus providing a mechanism for exploiting the IP assets.

Prosenjit Mondal works as a Manager Legal at Cognizant. He is responsible for driving IP Culture, IP mining and protection and Risk Mitigation activities at Cognizant. Prosenjit is a qualified Patent Attorney with B.Tech. in Information Technology from NIT Durgapur and LL. B (Hons in IPR) from IIT Kharagpur.

Cognizant technology solutions is one of the world’s leading professional services companies, transforming clients’ business, operating and technology models for the digital era. Cognizant’s unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant, a member of the NASDAQ-100, is ranked 205 on the Fortune 500 and is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world.