Audit Intellectual Property, Governance, and Financial Dependencies
The founder conducts a thorough audit of existing IP rights, corporate assets, shared resources, financial subsidies, and contractual obligations tied to the parent company. They compile cap table expectations, parent board mandates, and third-party commercial commitments.
Gathering these inputs establishes the legal, technical, and financial baseline of the venture's relationship with the parent corporate. It protects the decision-making process from unverified assumptions about asset ownership and ongoing operational support.
A comprehensive audit dossier containing confirmed IP assignment terms, detailed corporate service level costs, capitalization table projections, and board mandates. Every dependency must be backed by signed documentation or explicit executive confirmation.
Five questions an expert would ask when reviewing your output
Use these to challenge assumptions, pressure-test your logic, and check the quality of this action's output in the context of the parent task and wider venture development.
- 1
What unencumbered IP rights does the venture actually hold versus shared IP licensed from the parent company?
- 2
How accurately have you priced the true cost of corporate overheads and shared services currently absorbed by the parent?
- 3
What legal or regulatory approvals are strictly required from the corporate board before a spin-out can be legally executed?
- 4
Which key customer contracts are legally bound to the parent corporate identity and non-transferable to a new entity?
- 5
What historical R&D tax credits or grant funding obligations carry clawback risks upon structural separation?