New Book Takes a Hard Look at How Businesses and People Profit from IP

What is innovative? Who owns it? What is the best way to generate return on inventions and other works?

These are among the most vexing questions facing businesses today. A new book, by Bruce Berman, The Intangible Investor, takes a hard look at the ways companies, large and small, profit from inventions, and the rights that protect them.

The Intangible Investor – Profiting from Intellectual Property: Companies’ Most Elusive Assets (CloseUp Media, ISBN-13: 978-0615952352, 284 pages) goes to the heart of what constitutes the innovation economy: ideas, performance and utilizing intellectual property rights to generate value. It helps to differentiate between patent “trolls”, legitimate IP investors, and those who fear strong patents.

Berman’s fifth book provides businesses, investors and general audiences (1) a basis for understanding how IP can generate hidden value, (2) a foundation for what is meant by patent quality, and who, in fact, are the IP systems’ bad actors, and (3) a context to discern IP developments of the recent past in the hope of providing a clearer vision of the future.
The book title is a play on unapparent stakeholders who rely on intangible assets like patents that escape the balance sheet. The Intangible Investor is also an allusion to Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, which after 65 years is still the definitive book on value investing.
The Intangible Investor is available in print and digital editions.