A new report from the EUIPO makes for striking reading. IP-intensive industries generate 47.9% of EU GDP – €7.7 trillion. They employ one in three Europeans. They account for 78% of EU exports.
Yet only 13% of the companies holding that IP have ever tried to use it to raise finance. Most have never had it professionally valued.
The conclusion on how to fix this has priority #1: IP visibility. This was Intanify’s founding insight.
The report – IP-Backed Finance in Europe: State of Play and Future Perspectives – sets out a simple but powerful dependency chain. Before IP can be protected, before it can be valued, before it can be financed or used to drive growth, it must first be visible.
This isn’t a hierarchy of importance. It’s a sequence of prerequisites. You cannot skip step one.
The report makes visibility its Priority 1 – above standardised valuation, above lending infrastructure, above everything else. Before any of it works, the IP has to be seen.
Most companies are attempting steps two through five without ever completing step one.
Accounting standards haven’t kept up. If a company generates IP internally – builds software, develops know-how, creates a brand from scratch – that asset is almost always expensed rather than capitalised, even when it’s highly valuable.
The asymmetry is striking: buy a competitor and its IP lands on your balance sheet. Build the same thing yourself and it doesn’t. The most innovative firms are the most systematically misrepresented in their own accounts.
The EUIPO report rightly focuses on SMEs (companies of up to 249 employees) where the financing gap is most acute. But the visibility problem doesn’t stop there.
For larger companies, the consequences are different and arguably more costly.
M&A and transactions. Registered IP typically accounts for less than a third of a company’s intangible value. Trade secrets, data assets, and know-how sit invisible in standard due diligence. Acquirers discount what they can’t see. Sellers leave value on the table.
Tax. OECD DEMPE rules require intangibles to be identified “with specificity.” Transfer pricing documentation built only on registered IP misses most of the picture. R&D tax relief is routinely unclaimed on undocumented know-how and data assets.
Trade secrets. Courts require trade secrets to be identified with “reasonable particularity” before a claim can proceed. Without a pre-existing register, cases may be dismissed before they start – not because the trade secret didn’t exist, but because it was never documented.
Governance. Boards cannot manage what hasn’t been identified. IP blind spots become strategic blind spots. The view is always backwards.
For financiers, visibility resolves the core problem: information asymmetry. It gives lenders the structured data they need to assess an asset, for example, its separability from the business, how redeployable it is, how long its useful economic life is likely to be.
What the report makes clear – and this is key – is that stakeholders are less interested in a precise fair value figure than in enough structured information to form their own view. Disclosure before measurement. Identification before valuation.
For larger businesses, the cost of invisibility is the value that erodes quietly: through underpriced transfers, M&A transactions where unregistered assets evaporate at closing, and IP that walks out with the last key person to leave.
There is a €365 billion annual SME financing gap in Europe. A significant portion sits with IP-rich, innovation-led companies – exactly the businesses Europe most needs to back.
The EU’s Savings and Investment Union is the most ambitious capital mobilisation in Europe’s recent history, with the potential to unlock €150–580 billion in new financing flows for innovative companies.
But freed capital doesn’t flow to the most deserving firms. It flows to the most legible ones.
Companies that haven’t done the visibility work will watch that capital pass them by – directed instead to sectors with established collateral and mature financial infrastructure. This is a window. It isn’t a permanent open door.
IP discovery wasn’t a feature we added to Intanify. It was the founding insight.
Before you can protect, before you can value, before you can finance: you have to see what you have. That seemed clear to us when we started. The EUIPO’s report – and the €365 billion financing gap it documents – is confirmation that the problem is exactly as significant as we thought.
Intanify identifies your complete intangible asset estate: registered and unregistered, documented and buried in documents, visible and hidden. It’s what we were built to do.