They say “Get More Patents” but they really mean something else
They want leverage over competitors. Protection for revenue streams. A seat at the table in joint ventures and standards bodies. Licensing income from technology the market has decided to adopt.
“Get more patents” is how that comes out.
The instinct is right. What they’re really asking for is powerful. The roadmap to get there is almost always missing.
The gap between the instinct and the result
Most people in the room can connect the dots in theory. More patents should mean more leverage in negotiations. A stronger position in joint ventures. Real licensing revenue. Participation in standards bodies. Nobody disagrees with any of that.
But between “get more patents” and those outcomes, there is almost always a blank space. The hand-waving starts: file enough good patents and eventually the leverage materializes. Build up the count. Hire a better attorney. Something will happen.
Founders who hear “get more patents” start filing. An engineer builds something interesting. A disclosure gets drafted. An attorney files the application. The patent issues. The count goes up.
Nothing else changes.
The leverage doesn’t appear. The licensing income doesn’t start. The competitor doesn’t change behavior. The joint venture partner doesn’t care about the IP position.
Few companies have actually worked out how to get from the filing to the outcome. The connection isn’t automatic. It has to be designed.
What the roadmap looks like
Before the first filing, a designed portfolio answers three questions.
What are you actually trying to accomplish? Not “protect our technology” — something specific. Force a competitor to license or redesign. Own a position in a standards body. Create leverage in a distribution agreement. Make the portfolio lendable against revenue.[4] The answer determines what claims are worth writing and which filings belong in the portfolio at all.
What does each patent need to accomplish to serve that objective? Every filing has a job. Which competitor’s behavior does this claim constrain? Can infringement be detected from outside the infringer’s system, without their cooperation? Does a single actor infringe, or does infringement require the customer and the supplier to act together?
Every patent in the portfolio must be enforceable. Not “we could probably assert this” — litigation-grade.[5] Claims that would survive IPR. Infringement that can be detected and proven without the infringer’s cooperation. A single actor who infringes.
This is not about going to court. Most strong patent portfolios never see a courtroom. It is about whether you could go to court — and whether a competitor’s counsel, doing the analysis, concludes that infringing this patent is a serious risk. That conclusion is what changes behavior. A competitor who believes your patents are weak will infringe and wait.[6] A competitor who believes your patents would hold up in litigation will license, redesign, or stay out of the market. The leverage comes from the credible threat, not the lawsuit itself.
Enforceability is the baseline for any patent to be useful in any form — licensing, joint ventures, standards participation, patent pools, cross-licensing, competitive deterrence. All of those depend on the same thing: the other party’s belief that the patent is real. A patent that barely cleared prosecution does not produce that belief. A portfolio of such patents produces no leverage at all, regardless of what the count says.
For standards bodies and patent pools the scrutiny is explicit — validity reviews filter out weak patents before the conversation starts. But the standard is the same everywhere. Without enforceability, there is no leverage, no licensing, no behavior change. Just the cost of maintaining assets that no one respects.
A patent that can’t meet that bar doesn’t have a defined job. It is documentation, not strategy.
How do these patents work together? A single patent is a claim. A designed portfolio is a position. Competitors can design around a single claim. They cannot design around a coordinated set of claims that anticipates the design-around, covers the alternative implementation, reaches the supplier and the device manufacturer, and extends into adjacent markets before the competitor arrives. That requires planning every filing in relation to every other filing — not filing each one in isolation and hoping the portfolio assembles itself into something useful.
Those questions get answered before drafting starts. Not after issuance, during a portfolio review that finds the gaps.
Where founders get stuck
The instinct to file is right. The sequence is wrong.
Most founders file a patent on what was built. The claims describe their own product. The patent issues. They have successfully documented their architecture in a public record — and taught every competitor exactly where to step to avoid the claims.[7]
The next question — what does the continuation cover, and which design-around does it close? — never gets asked. There is no plan because the question was never part of the process. The portfolio grows by accumulation: another disclosure, another filing, another allowed claim. Each one a response to what was built, with no connection to where the company is trying to go.
The CEO wanted leverage over a competitor. Nobody mapped the patents to produce it. The result is a portfolio that passes the prosecution test — novel, non-obvious, allowed — and fails the business test entirely.
What Ericsson actually built
Ericsson holds more than 60,000 patents.[1] In 2024, their licensing revenue was $1.3 billion.[2]
That result is not the output of filing more patents. It is the output of thirty years of disciplined, coordinated work in which every filing had a job inside a larger system — and that system got stronger with every patent added to it.
Ericsson’s business model is standards licensing. They go to the standards committees for LTE and 5G, contribute technology to the standard, and file patents to cover what they contribute — before the standard is ratified, while the territory can still be owned.[3] Each patent covers technology the standard requires. Not a clever invention that someone might want. Technology that every cellular device on the market is forced to use.
That capability was built over decades, deepened with each standards cycle, refined with each licensing negotiation.
The 60,000 patents are not 60,000 individual bullets. They are a system. Each patent reinforces the others. Each continuation closes an exit. The whole portfolio makes the same argument: if you ship a cellular device, you pay rent. FRAND licensing is how they collect. But FRAND only works if the patents underneath it are designed to be unavoidable — and building that takes decades of disciplined, connected filing.
That $1.3 billion didn’t happen because Ericsson filed a lot of patents. Companies file a lot of patents and never collect a dollar in licensing. What’s visible from the outside is three decades of consistent, coordinated behavior: standards contributions paired with patents on those contributions, cycle after cycle, standard after standard. The pattern is too sustained and too coherent to be accidental.
What a designed portfolio requires
It requires knowing what you are trying to accomplish before the first patent is filed.
It requires every filing to have a job, stated in advance: which competitor behavior does this constrain, how will infringement be detected, what does the continuation cover.
It requires the continuation to be planned before the initial specification is drafted — because the specification must be written broad enough to support those continuation claims, and you cannot write it that way unless you know what the continuations will cover. This is the constraint that forces the design decision to the front of the process. Skip the planning and the exits stay open.
But the specification also cannot claim everything. Improvements and variations that are filed as new applications get a fresh 20-year clock. File them as continuations and they inherit the parent’s priority date — the clock doesn’t reset.[8] A designed portfolio manages this deliberately: broad enough to cover the design-arounds that need to be locked down now, disciplined enough to leave room for new filings that reset the timeline on the next generation of the technology.
And it requires someone to hold the whole thing together — someone who knows what the company is trying to build, reviews each filing against it, and asks the question the prosecution process never asks: what is this patent for, and how does it connect to everything else?[9]
The question underneath the instinct
Prosecution asks: is this patentable?
Portfolio strategy asks: what is this patent supposed to accomplish?[10]
Prosecution answers its question faithfully for every filing. Portfolio strategy mostly doesn’t get asked. The result is a growing portfolio that passes the prosecution test and fails the business test — patents that exist, cost money to maintain, and produce nothing.
“Get more patents” is the right instinct. The question underneath it is: toward what end, in what sequence, and how does each one get you there.
Founders who can answer that are building what they thought they were buying.
2 Ericsson Q4 2024 Financial Results ↩
3 Ericsson’s Road to 6G Patent Leadership ↩
4 How Patent Licensing Works ↩
5 Are Your Patents Excellent — Or Just Expensive? ↩
6 Why Startup Patents Are Doomed From The Start ↩
7 Stop Patenting Your Invention. Patent Your Competitor’s Product. ↩
8 How Continuation Applications Impact Patent Term ↩
9 Why Patent Competence Is a CEO’s Responsibility ↩
10 Just Do Your Job — Why Patent Attorneys Avoid Making Decisions ↩