Martin A. Bader
Managing Partner, Managing Advisory Group, BGW AG, Rorschach am Bodensee, Switzerland
Portfolios are instruments for analyzing and visualizing strategic positioning and lines of attack. The diversity of portfolio techniques is immense, although every technique has its blind spot as a result of the choice of axis dimensions. This contribution is based on the so-called St. Gallen approach to the management of technologies and patents. The approach was developed in the early 1990s at Europe’s well-known Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (e.g. Boutellier et al. 2007) and has been constantly fine-tuned to practice on the basis of numerous industry projects. The methodology for the strategic management of patent portfolios, based on and developed from this approach, is presented below (Gassmann and Bader 2007).