One of Scotland’s leading healthcare innovation bodies believes that a new and ever-evolving online hub ‘is set to be vital in helping pioneering thinkers unlock the true value in their assets’

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has just launched the Knowledge Asset Management Hub, offering practical guidance for health and social care innovators among others on intangible assets, including data, trade secrets, and relationships that hold value.

The hub also offers guidance on intellectual property (IP) — a key group of knowledge assets — encompassing formal rights such as patents, trademarks, and copyrights that safeguard innovation and brand reputation.

Scottish healthcare’s own assets are considered fundamental drivers of innovation, clinical safety, sustainability, and the economy – and the hub aims to improve their management across the whole system.

Its tools are designed to help users make better decisions about their IP, while reducing risk, and better identifying opportunities for collaboration and commercialisation.

Innovation Commercialisation Manager at InnoScot Health, Fiona Schaefer said: “This is a hugely welcome resource for our ambitious thinkers who are continuously pushing for positive change — but who also remain determined to protect and commercialise their IP and broader knowledge assets.

“With the aim for the hub to initially be a strategic foundation for accessing practical tools that continue to evolve, it is set to be vital in helping pioneering healthcare innovators unlock the true value in their assets while allowing more spinouts to gain investment to scale.

“It will therefore be a resource that must be taken advantage of by Scotland’s academia and other public and private organisations. I am in no doubt that this comprehensive guidance will help them collaboratively progress ideas for better patient outcomes.

“InnoScot Health believes that with expert support and the right partners to take forward great concepts – and ensure the knowledge assets within them remains protected – breakthrough thinking can become exciting reality.”

The hub, designed to address a wide range of IP and knowledge asset challenges that arise across the commercialisation lifecycle, comprises four core components:

• Institutional IP strategy guidance — practical frameworks to help universities and research organisations develop and implement IP strategies and policies at an organisational level
• Project-level IP risk and opportunity tools — resources to help teams identify and manage IP considerations within individual projects, from early-stage collaboration agreements through to commercialisation
• Patent data analysis and IP due diligence resources — tools to support the assessments that underpin licencing, spinout formation, and investment decisions
• Knowledge Asset Management Toolkit — guidance recognising that effective knowledge asset management requires strategic and operational management

Fiona added: “Scotland’s ability to convert more of its healthcare expertise into commercial impact depends significantly on good quality IP and wider knowledge asset management.

“Effective IP decisions, when made early in the process, can be crucial in determining whether institutions and the wider economy capture the full value from their investment.”

The IPO says that the hub “was developed through extensive university-facing engagement programmes” including structured surveys and a series of online workshops involving technology transfer professionals, knowledge exchange practitioners and research managers.

It believes that IP-intensive sectors including life sciences represent a substantial share of the UK’s economic output – nearly £300 billion (around 27%) of non-financial value-added output.

These sectors also represent some 15.5% of total UK employment (around 4.5 million jobs), and more than half of all UK goods exports (159.7 billion).