Enhancing Innovation ROI by Adding Patents at the Front End: Some Resources

A new client has asked for some information on how consideration patents and IP at the front end of the innovation/product development process can enhance business value.  Readers of this blog might find this material informative, also.

This is a published article from Innovation Management article entitled “How to Improve Innovation ROI with Early Stage Patent Expertise.”  In this article, I discuss how IP can help orient innovation teams in a direction that can enhance value capture.  Practical steps to implement such a program into innovation processes is included in this article.

Here is a YouTube video that explains my process simply.  In short, including IP at the front end of a company’s innovation process allows one to enhance their calibration with respect to the IP rights of others to better ensure that they will achieve the desired ROI on innovation investment.

This blog post describes how a large company failed to capture the full value of its deep investment in a new product innovation.  These folks (the name has been changed to protect the not-so-innocent) failed to grasp that their innovation was not a product, but a customer solution.  This first-to-market Fortune company did not understand that the customer cared not about their cool product, but that their pain was solved.  As a result, competitors were able to also fulfill the same customer need without infringing the 20 or so patents on the market originator’s product.   Since the post was written, the market originator has undertaken a couple of strategy changes.  However, it continues to lose market share to non-infringing competitive products in an increasingly price-eroded market.

There’s a whole lot more in the archives of this blog, and please don’t hesitate to let me know if you’d like more information.