An increasing number of companies in sectors ranging from consumer products to high technology are discovering what companies in life sciences already know: the licensing of intellectual property can generate healthy revenues and bolster profits. A recent cross-industry international benchmarking survey shows that many companies have set ambitious goals both for selling their best ideas and for buying the ideas of others to use in their own research and development (Exhibit 1).

Unfortunately, though, even companies with the most modest goals may have little chance of reaching them. Fully 57 percent of the survey respondents say that fewer than one-quarter of their recent IP deals met or exceeded initial strategic and financial expectations. In some cases, the deficit is the result of unrealistic targets: executives imagine that their organizations can emulate IP portfolio-management leaders such as DuPont and Microsoft.

Many companies struggling with IP management lack not only processes and organizational structures that could link their financial targets for IP (such as revenues from new products using licensed technology) to their strategic objectives but also the ability to assess how much IP can contribute to their...