Q24 & Q25: Developing Partnerships with Intellectual Property
My pre-survey reading enlightened me to the myriad ways that intellectual property assets are used to expand market opportunities. Partnering with other brands or companies is one strategy for market expansion. I had worked at nonprofits that sought a variety of partnerships and I wondered how prevalent it would be within this sample.
The 19 survey respondents were asked if the nonprofit’s intellectual property is used to create partnership opportunities with other organizations or agencies.
The nonprofits shared:
Seventeen (17): Use their intellectual property to create partnership opportunities with other organizations.
Two (2): Do not use their intellectual property to create partnership opportunities.
The seventeen that do use create partnership opportunities with intellectual property were asked a follow-up question about the purpose of those partnerships.
The responses the nonprofits selected were:
Sixteen (16): Use partnerships to reach new constituents
Six (6): Use partnerships to advocate
Twelve (12): Use partnerships to generate revenue
Four (4): Selected other and wrote-in that they use partnerships to:
scale our mission efficiently and effectively
educate/build capacity
maintain quality control, consistency among programs, and fidelity to model
serve teachers and help districts develop robust induction programs
Except for the quality control response, the write-in responses could be categorized with the answers provided. Not unlike my professional experiences, the responding nonprofits generally do utilize their IP for market expansion through partnerships, and with this sample it is a priority.
You can skip to the summary of all of the responses in the Social Entrepreneurs and Intellectual Property Management paper. Or, read through each of the blog posts tagged as Intellectual Property Data V1.0 for a more recent analysis of the data.