How can I utilize my patents?
Patents can be utilized in different ways: The most common way is to use it for marketing the product itself with the claim: "patented technology". Of course patents give a time limited monopole on a certain technology to the assignee, therefore the competitors have to bypass the patented technology.
Ignoring this and infringing a third parties patents can lead to very high penalties. One other utilization is to find licensees in certain regions and to explore the market by using patents to attract possible cooperation partners.
Further licensing to competitors is as well possible, but this  happens not very often because they prefer to work around and not to pay licensing fees. Further any M&A transaction or due diligence for different reasons, the patents were valuated.