Webinar Recap: Leveraging IP for Strategic & Financial Value
Invest in Equity Lunch & Learn | June 2026
June’s Lunch & Learn welcomed Pernille Winding Gojkovic, CEO and Partner at HØIBERG, a Scandinavian IP firm specialising in life science, for a deep dive into how investors should think about intellectual property across the deal lifecycle. Below are the key themes and learnings from the session.
IP strategy is a business question, not just a legal one
Pernille opened by framing the purpose of intellectual property rights: their job is to turn ideas into money. An IP strategy only works if it’s integrated into the business plan, aligning the science, the legal protection, and the commercial timeline. The first due diligence question investors should ask isn’t “do they have a patent?” but “do they have an IP strategy at all, and does it match what we want as investors?”
A sound IP strategy needs to address three things: the company’s own rights, the rights that others might hold, and what happens where those overlap (enforcement or licensing).
Patents are powerful, but narrower than founders often imply
A few structural facts about patents matter more than people expect:
They are national rights, not global ones. Any claim of a “world patent” is a red flag, and investors should check whether what’s being described is actually just a PCT application (an application, not a granted right).
A patent gives you the right to stop others, not an automatic right to use your own invention. A company can hold a valid patent and still be blocked from bringing a product to market if it falls within someone else’s broader, earlier claim. It’s a counterintuitive point, but an important one for assessing freedom to operate.
Deadlines can quietly kill a portfolio. The 12-month priority window and the 30-month national phase deadline are the two most consequential. Miss either, and the underlying right can disappear, even after a patent has been granted, through missed annuities or office actions. Part of due diligence should be confirming the portfolio is actually alive, not just that it once existed.
Ownership and inventorship deserve more scrutiny than they usually get
Two due diligence questions came up repeatedly:
Are all the actual inventors listed? Inventorship is a technical-legal question (who conceived the idea, not who carried it out) and getting it wrong can render a granted US patent void.
Is there a clear chain of assignment? Ownership defaults to the employer, including universities, with Sweden as the single exception globally. Any spinout with university-affiliated inventors needs a clean, exclusive license from the university to the company, not just an assumption that the founders own what they invented.
Building a portfolio ahead of an exit starts years earlier
Your IP will play a meaningful role in an eventual acquisition or IPO, and its important to build your patent strategy with that outcome in mind from the outset. That starts with maintaining open and transparent communication with your patent attorney as the science, technology, and business strategy evolve. When patent attorneys have a clear understanding of where the business is headed, they can help shape a portfolio that supports those objectives over time, rather than trying to retrofit an IP strategy when an exit is already on the horizon. This ongoing alignment reduces the risk of surprises during diligence and ensures the portfolio is positioned appropriately, whether that means broader protection to support an acquisition or a more focused portfolio for an IPO.
Other tools for extending and strengthening a portfolio:
Lifecycle management: new filings on refinements (new formulations, new uses, new delivery methods) can extend exclusivity well beyond the original patent term. The pharmaceutical “patent cliff,” where revenue drops sharply the day a patent expires and generics flood in, is the cautionary tale here.
Complementary rights: design protection, trademarks, and trade secrets all build a moat around the core patent. Notably, companies holding both patents and trademarks saw a threefold increase in the odds of a successful exit.
Filing strategy:
Offensive: broad, territory-claiming, sometimes used as a competitive smokescreen
Defensive: narrow, cost-efficient, focused on what’s actually being commercialised
A prioritised mix based on which products matter most
Where overlooked IP costs investors
The clearest, most actionable message of the session: it’s expensive to be cost-conscious. A basic IP health check costs roughly €1,000–2,000 and can flag major issues (a lapsed portfolio, missing assignments, a weak core patent family) long before a full due diligence, which is far more costly and often happens too late to change the outcome.
A landscape or “mini FTO” analysis is a similarly low-cost way to check whether dominating rights already exist in relevant markets before product development goes too far down a path that infringes someone else’s claim.
On AI and patents
In response to an audience question, Pernille noted that AI-assisted discoveries (new compounds, new molecules) can be patented as long as the output is novel and inventive, but the inventor must always be listed as a human; AI cannot be named as an inventor or owner, a position that’s already been tested and rejected by patent offices. The underlying code itself is protected by copyright, not patent, since copyright is a notoriously weak form of protection. What’s actually patentable is the functionality, what the system does in the real world, provided that functionality is itself new and inventive.
If you’d like a copy of the slides or a recording of the full webinar, get in touch at info@investinequity.vc.
Please join us for our next Lunch & Learn on the 8th of July for a conversation with Marissa Fayer, author of Undervalued to Unavoidable: Women's Health as Infrastructure.
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