What can a portfolio dashboard tell you about budgets and spending, especially if we are
going into the area where you’re comparing and benchmarking against other companies?
The portfolio dashboard can show you filing trends where both yourself and a benchmark
market competitor or market player that you want to be like or you want to make sure
you’re in concordance with. So you can look at a benchmarked owner and say that
they’re filing ten patents a month, and you look at your own budget and you’re only –
you only have a budget for five patents a month. This can be a justification to spend or
get more than ten patents a month.

Now, you can go deeper and say, “Well, the ten patents a month that are being filed are
not really in the area of my technology or not.” So you can use it both sides, to either
increase budget or decrease budget based upon your needs.

It also helps you manage spending, because then you can show ready graphics to your
budget committee when you’re starting to bring your budget together each year and say,
“Here’s what we’ve done last year. Here’s what we’d like to do the following year. Here
are comparisons between other companies that are in our space, and so we would like this
amount of budget moving forward for the next year.”