Related Tickers: BRBY, CSCO , GOOG

Beleaguered smartphone manufacturer Blackberry (BBRY) is in the middle of an ambitious turnaround bid as it tries to move away from its traditional smartphone hardware to a software-centric model. BlackBerry has achieved considerable success in its turnaround bid, with CEO John Chen at the helm. BlackBerry software/licensing revenue rose 150% Y/Y during the May quarter, by far the company’s fastest growth. Software & Licensing revenue now accounts for a respectable 21% of company revenue. The strong software growth was partly fueled by two patent licensing and cross-licensing deals that BlackBerry struck with Cisco (CSCO) and another unnamed party.

BlackBerry will announce Q2 2015 results on Sept. 25 2015, and its software segment is expected to continue blazing the trail for the company.

BlackBerry Patent Monetization Efforts

Now BlackBerry has announced a new plan to step up efforts to monetize its wide cache of patents. BlackBerry owns a staggering 44,000 patents, which it can freely monetize. Patent monetization can be achieved using two main channels: selling the patents outright, or licensing the patents to other organizations for a predetermined period of time the way BlackBerry did with Cisco.

Selling patents is usually the most lucrative way to monetize them since all a company has to do is look for a willing buyer then transfer all the rights of the patents to the buyer usually for a large sum of money. There is, however, a big problem that faces companies that try to sell their patents: the true value of any patent is usually highly subjective and hard to determine fairly. There are two tech companies that have learned this the hard way: Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT).