The Group

Evolution of the Finmeccanica Group patent portfolio

In an international market context increasingly characterised by companies winning and maintaining market shares based on the innovative content of their products and processes, the Companies’ know-how and innovative capability have taken on decisive strategic importance.

The consequent capacity to protect and safeguard technologies, systemic solutions and in general the Companies’ innovations with Intellectual Property Rights therefore becomes fundamental in this new economic context, based on knowledge.

Furthermore, it becomes necessary to identify and create, in a continuous and dynamic manner, the strategic value of the IPR, relating them in real time with ongoing and planned activities.

IPR in Finmeccanica thus become a key part of the processes aimed at improving the Group’s competitive position, its reputation as an acknowledged technological and innovative leader on a worldwide scale, and, consequentially, its market value.

Intellectual Property protection as a guiding criteria is therefore present from the earliest stages of product and process development. R&D projects, from their inception, must establish the possibility of obtaining a patent and identifying mechanisms for protecting the technologies and solutions of the products, systems and processes.

Furthermore, Group IPR management is oriented towards an ever-increasing optimisation of patent and brand portfolios and to their consequent valorisation and business exploitation.

The Group Intellectual Property Governance therefore aims at safeguarding Group intellectual property, obtaining patents and valorising new product, system and process innovations.

Aware of the strategic importance of its intellectual property rights, Finmeccanica governs them through a complex system that includes and optimises all the following aspects related to intellectual property management:

• the safeguarding of patents, models, designs and brands
• the management and optimisation of their portfolio at the Group level
• the definition of intellectual property clauses in contracts with third parties
• the enforcement of rights through the monitoring of competitors
• the valorisation of rights through licensing or crosslicensing, sales, technical assistance and offset agreements
• technology transfer between Group Companies and from/towards the outside world  

The global management of intellectual capital and the whole of intellectual property rights IPR have a specially designed portal which, in addition to acting as the archive and depository of the whole of the IPR, technical and technological infrastructure technologies, functions as a true “Marketplace”, initially among all Group companies and, in a second phase, also among Group companies and outside companies as well as the academic world, in order to create an “Open Innovation” environment perfectly directed and controlled by Finmeccanica.