How do I build a list of potential licensees or buyers?

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Beyond the Patent · Accepted Answer

Start from concentration, not breadth: in recent tracked years, software alone accounted for 52% of brokered patent sales — buyers cluster by sector, so a focused list of 20–50 well-chosen targets outperforms a blast to hundreds.

The four best sources of names: forward citations to your patent (companies working in your exact space), adjacent assignees in your CPC classes, product search (who sells what your claims cover), and the secondary market's active buyers. Merge, dedupe, then qualify each name on revenue in the market, licensing history, and strategic fit.

Qualification is where the list earns its keep: twenty companies with a reason to care, each with the right contact identified, is a campaign; five hundred unqualified names is a spam run. Building that qualified list for a specific patent is one of the most concrete things we hand an owner — and it's usually the moment the whole process starts feeling real.

How do I build a list of potential licensees or buyers?

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