Intellectual property is well understood to be a major corporate or institutional asset. This includes patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets, which have long been used for strategic and financial purposes, such as positioning products for favorable market penetration and securing rights to make marketing of particular products possible. However, some organizations have sophisticated approaches to leveraging their intellectual property, often with dramatic results. Companies such as General Electric/RCA, IBM, Lucent, Philips and Texas Instruments, and universities such as Columbia and Stanford, are well known for their success in realizing substantial financial returns from licensing activities. Likewise, many new enterprises, particularly in high tech, Internet and health care, will base their success on their ability to leverage market position or strategic relationships and even capital funding with their innovative intellectual assets.

Patenting inventions is an important activity worldwide, and the number of patents filed increases every year. For example, the annual number of patents filed in the United States has quadrupled in the past twenty years, and the number issued rose over 75% between 1990 and 2000. Patents usually result from a major investment in research and development and involve significant filing and prosecution expenditures, which could amount to $100,000 or more for each patent.

Many organizations are now discovering the latent value of their intellectual property portfolios. Some organizations may have appreciated the value but had no internal staff trained to deal with the business opportunities that these assets present. Such organizations approach these opportunities in multiple ways, including creating a permanent specialized staff or looking to their law departments to exploit these assets. Others may prefer to look to experts, such as FRI, with the unique skills and experience to complement, supplement or supplant their internal staff. It is these organizations who provide Fairfield Resources International, Inc. an opportunity to dramatically enhance the value and returns from their intellectual property.