Building an Intellectual Property (IP) strategy for your startup, but not sure where to start? While IP professionals can play a central role, the first steps are often taken in-house. The AirFrameIP platform can help companies build the knowledge, capabilities, and internal processes to strategically manage their intellectual property, while supporting more effective collaboration with external IP professionals. We sat down to interview the co-founders: Dr. Houston Brown, patent agent, and Dr. Erika J Murray, IP lawyer.
What are the three most important things a startup should focus on when building an IP strategy?
An effective IP strategy should focus on the following three core considerations: the startup’s business model, a clear definition of its innovations, and how those innovations are protected and strategically positioned.
An IP strategy should not exist in isolation from the company’s commercialization plan. Founders should think about how the startup intends to create value in a specific market, whether through product development, licensing, strategic partnerships, or manufacturing scale-up. The plan often determines which forms of IP protection will matter most and where IP can create meaningful competitive advantage.
How can online tools, like the AirFrameIP platform, help startups build and manage their IP strategy?
The AirFrameIP platform contains structured learning modules, videos, interactive forms, templates, and tools designed to help startups as well as more established technology companies build, manage, and continuously evolve their IP strategy internally. The IP Strategy Module helps companies organize the strategic thinking, internal documentation, and decision-making processes required to build and maintain an IP strategy—and aids companies in aligning IP strategy with their broader business and commercialization objectives before and while engaging external IP professionals.
Founders can document inventions, track potential IP assets, assess IP vulnerabilities, and maintain visibility over existing IP rights and related agreements. This creates a structured internal record of the company’s intellectual property and helps ensure that important innovations and know-how are consistently identified and evaluated as the company grows.
With planning, startups can identify and sequence IP-related initiatives, aligning with product development milestones, partnerships, manufacturing plans, and commercialization efforts. Their IP strategy is refined and iterated upon as the company’s technology, market strategy, and partnerships evolve. The framework and documentation can then be shared with legal service providers, reducing the need to begin with early-stage discovery.
By conducting this work internally, startups build and maintain an intellectual property strategy that is structured, informed, and closely aligned with how they intend to compete, protect their innovations, and scale.
What kind of assets could startups identify as having IP?
Many founders don’t initially recognize that their products or services may contain multiple IP components. In practice, a startup’s IP often includes proprietary processes, software, data, technical know-how, trademarks, and trade secrets.
Identifying what is truly novel, difficult to replicate, or commercially valuable helps determine what should be protected, and which strategies and forms of IP protection (such as patents, trade secrets, trademark protection, or copyright) may be most appropriate.
How can startups think more broadly about IP in terms of their company’s business strategy?
Startups need to think about how their IP will be protected and positioned as the company grows. This includes deciding what should be patented, what should remain confidential, and how the startup will manage IP when entering collaborations, manufacturing relationships, or licensing discussions.
A comprehensive and well-structured IP strategy that the startup takes ownership of can strengthen negotiations, support fundraising, and help ensure the startup maintains control of its core technology as it scales.
Startups are busy. In your opinion, which aspects of IP strategy should startups develop internally, and which parts are best handled by external IP professionals?
Startups should rely on external IP professionals for aspects of IP strategy that require specialized legal expertise or carry significant legal or commercial implications. This includes activities such as patent drafting and prosecution, trademark filings, freedom-to-operate analysis, and negotiating complex intellectual property provisions in commercial agreements.
These tasks require technical drafting and legal expertise that patent agents, trademark agents, and IP lawyers are uniquely qualified to provide. However, several foundational aspects of building an IP strategy should begin within the company and be maintained by the startup.
This includes:
- Identifying and documenting innovation
- Mapping potential IP assets across the company
- Aligning intellectual property decisions with the startup’s business model and commercialization strategy
- Determining how to protect and leverage its technology as the startup grows
Founders and leadership teams are best positioned to understand their technology roadmap and how their innovation creates value in the market.
Startups often engage external IP professionals before distilling these elements internally. In many cases, the knowledge exists within the startup’s team, but it’s not organized in a way that external professionals can efficiently act on. As a result, a significant amount of time is spent on early-stage discovery before the legal and agency expertise can begin. This reinforces the importance of developing a structured internal IP strategy before and throughout engagement with external advisors.
It’s important to support these internal aspects of IP strategy development and ongoing management. The goal is not to replace patent agents or IP lawyers, but to give companies a structured environment to map innovation, document IP assets, and develop and maintain an internal IP strategy before and throughout engagement with external advisors.
This allows startups to approach external professionals with greater clarity and direction, while maintaining internal visibility and control over their IP assets as the company scales or pivots. When founders enter conversations with legal service providers with a clearer understanding of their innovation and IP strategy, the process tends to be faster, more strategic, and often more cost-effective.
What’s the one aspect of IP strategy that startups most often overlook?
IP strategy should be treated as an ongoing internal business process, rather than something considered once, handled by external IP professionals, and then shelved.
Many founders associate IP strategy primarily with filing patents or trademarks. They often focus on engaging external IP professionals only when it’s time to file or when they’ve received some government funding. However, building an effective IP strategy ideally begins much earlier and should continue throughout the life of the startup.
In practice, the startup needs to understand the broader strategic context of the business. This can include pitch decks, product plans, commercialization strategies, technical roadmaps, and market positioning.
From there, startups can begin translating their business objectives into IP considerations, such as identifying where IP creates value or risk, understanding the surrounding IP landscape, and determining which innovations are most critical to protect. This strategic thinking can then be organized internally by the startup through a structured framework that connects business strategy to IP decisions.
Equally important is integrating IP considerations across the organization. IP decisions often involve collaboration between technical teams, product development teams, commercialization teams, and legal advisors. Establishing structured internal processes helps capture innovation, assess IP risks, audit existing assets, and organize ongoing IP actions.
Finally, IP strategy work should translate into practical action. Startups benefit from regularly identifying and prioritizing IP activities, such as documenting innovation, assessing IP vulnerabilities, mapping competitive differentiators to an ideal IP portfolio, auditing existing IP assets and risks, and sequencing future IP initiatives based on importance and urgency.
Approaching IP strategy in this structured way helps ensure that IP evolves alongside product development, partnerships, and market expansion, while continuing to support the startup’s broader strategic objectives.
Access the AirFrameIP Strategy Module
Want to start building your IP strategy, in-house? All NVBC startups in BC, Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories have free access to the AirFrameIP Strategy Module. While not required, we highly recommend completing IP Pathways before engaging with this material.
About AirFrameIP
Dr. Houston Brown is a registered patent agent, and Dr. Erika J. Murray is a lawyer and engineer. Together, they are the founders of AirFrameIP.
AirFrameIP’s mission is to equip technology companies with the knowledge, tools, and confidence to strategically manage their intellectual property and protect what matters most. Its goal is to make practical IP education and strategic guidance accessible to technology companies at every stage of growth through a platform that combines structured online learning with practical tools, workflows, and a Microsoft 365-based workspace. Together, these resources enable companies to apply their learning, build internal IP capabilities, and actively manage their intellectual property assets and risks as their businesses evolve.
Dr. Houston Brown is a registered patent agent in both Canada and the United States, a patented inventor, and a published researcher. He’s won numerous intellectual property awards and is an active contributor to the profession through his work with Canada’s College of Patent Agents and Trademark Agents.
Dr. Erika J. Murray is a commercial technology and intellectual property lawyer with a PhD in engineering. Erika has practiced at top-ranked internationally recognized IP firms and, for the past seven years, has served as fractional in-house counsel, providing strategic commercial contracting and IP legal advice to venture-backed high-growth companies and multinational corporations.
