Smart business leaders understand today that IP Strategy should form a fundamental pillar of their value creation-directed business strategy. By taking a "business eye view" toward IP, forward-thinking corporate managers seek to capture the true value of their company, which today is increasingly measured in the form of intangible assets such as patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. If you have read this far in this post, you no doubt realize that your company must develop and execute on an IP Strategy in order to maximize intangible asset value. But, IP Strategy is only one part of the process of generating and maximizing this asset value. As an IP and Patent Business Strategist (more info here: The Hutter Group), I have found that even the most robust business-directed IP Strategy is likely doomed to failure if your company does not also establish an IP Culture within your organization. Put simply,
How to Make Sure Your IP Strategy Plan is Not Doomed to Failure
How to Prevent IP Ownership Issues When A Corporate Strategic Alliance, Joint Venture or Open Innovation Project Fails
Technology-focused collaborations form a foundation of today's corporate planning strategies. Such collaborations can be in the form of strategic alliances, joint ventures, open innovation or other legal structures. Regardless of how the participants characterize and legally structure such collaborations, the most common motivation for forming such alliances is to pool technology and R & D resources. When technology and R & D is involved, it must follow that IP ownership issues should loom large in the planning stage of the collaboration. However, my experience shows that the parties rarely give appropriate consideration to IP ownership in the agreements that are supposed to fully set out the rights and responsibilities of the parties. I can say with authority that IP issues are not usually given proper consideration in collaborative agreements because my expertise in this area results primarily from helping clients after their collaborations
Response to WSJ Online Article: What Business Owners Should Know About NOT Patenting
Today, the Wall Street Journal Online published an article entitled "What Business Owners Should Know About Patenting". In this article, Stuart Weinberg interviews James McDonough, an attorney at the well-respected Fish & Richardson law firm. Mr. McDonough gives excellent advice about the process of building an intellectual property portfolio. However, he skips over a crucial first step--does building a patent portfolio really create long term value for your business? In many cases, the answer will clearly be "yes". In many other cases, building a intellectual property portfolio could actually reduce or destroy your company's asset value. By focusing his advice on the portfolio building step and later, Mr. Donough ignores the foundation on which your company should start the portfolio-building process. First, an admission: I created a lot of value for myself and my law firm partners over the years by obtaining patents that did not ultimately create business value for
Technology Start-up Entrepreneurs and CEO’s: If Your Goal is Investment or Acquisition by a Big Company, You are Probably Patenting the Wrong Things
Do you treat your patents as a fence or a tollbooth? If you wish for your start-up technology company to obtain investment from or acquisition by a bigger player, you had better understand the difference. Most start-up technology company entrepreneurs and CEO's understand that patents can be key to establishing the value of a new business idea. Typically, entrepreneurs and CEO's such as yourself will engage patent attorneys to build an IP portfolio that protects the start-up's technology and products to the fullest extent possible. The motivation for this effort and expense is, of course, to to protect your start-up's idea from use by others. As management of a start-up you may be seeking to build an ongoing business around the patented technology, but often the goal of building a solid patent portfolio is to make your business an attractive target for investment or acquisition by a larger company. As an intellectual
Recent BusinessWeek Article Confirms that Energy Innovation is Rampant: Why These Innovations Should be Patented
This current BusinessWeek article entitled "The Real Question: Should Oil be Cheap?" confirms that innovations directed toward energy savings are rampant in these days of high energy prices. Specifically, the article states that "[h]igh energy prices [] water the flowers of innovation, making investments in alternatives pay off . . . ." As I wrote in this blog previously, along with such innovations comes the opportunity for savvy corporate managers to obtain exclusive rights to these energy usage improvements by developing and executing on patent strategies that prevent their competitors from benefiting from their investments in innovation. Moreover, as I wrote in this blog post, I believe that The Pickens Plan will open the floodgates of patenting in the area of wind energy and turbine technology. I realized after writing these blog posts that some people might find the idea of patenting energy innovations distasteful. Such a perspective
Innovators: Make Sure Your Company Owns the Fruits of Your Open Innovation Projects
In case there was any doubt, this New York Times article of July 22, 2008 shows that Open Innovation is "hot". And it is not just consumer products companies that have jumped on the bandwagon: companies such as HP, IBM and Microsoft have reportedly embraced the Open Innovation model. But, did you also know that, if your company is not careful, you could end up sharing patent rights to any inventions resulting from your Open Innovation collaborations? If you are going to play in the Open Innovation game, you must also understand how to prevent collaborators outside your company from owning the fruits of your company's innovations. This is a very easy issue to address on the front end of the Open Innnovation process and should be standard procedure for any innovation professional. However, as detailed by Greg Daines in his Ideanomics blog, intellectual property strategy is not
It’s All About the Numbers: SuperCrunchers of Patent Data will Gain Competitive Advantage
A recent book entitled Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart (available at http://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smart/dp/0553805401) presents an intriguing perspective of how forward-thinking companies can use the wealth of data available today to obtain an edge against competitors. The book, written by Ian Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at Yale University, posits essentially that he who crunches the available data will come out ahead in this modern world of massive amounts of data. A detailed review of this book from Newsweek is found here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/40860. The "Super Crunchers" premise applies strongly to the world of patents. Indeed, when leading companies such as P &G, GE and others engage in multi-faceted corporate intelligence programs, it cannot be a controversial to contend that those companies that mine and apply the results of data analysis of both their own patent portfolios and those of competitors will obtain valuable information
50% of Money Invested in Venture Capital is Lost: The Right Patent Analytics Can Improve These Odds
According to this article by Arlene Jacobius in Pension and Investments Online, 50% of all investment in venture capital is a loss. This article, which is based upon separate research projects by a Chicago Graduate School of Business professor and a former Chief Economist at the SEC, indicates that the actual return on venture capital investment is not much different from the average annualized returns on the smallest NASDAQ stocks. In particular, the return on venture capital investment from 1987 to 2001 in these smallest stocks was 62% as compared to the 59% mean return of venture capital funds. This 59% value certainly does not reflect the investing public's general perception that venture capital return on investment markedly outweighs what one can obtain on the stock market. And, it is this apparently erroneous assumption of perceived higher return that presumably justifies the risks associated with venture capital investment by
If You Have to Ask Your Patent Attorney What Your Company’s Patent Strategy Is, You Don’t Have One
Tonight I had dinner with a patent attorney friend of mine who I have known for more than 10 years. For the purposes of this post, let's call her "Sue." Sue and I met as young patent attorneys at an intellectual property law firm and grew up together to become partners there. Unlike myself, however, Sue has remained in the law firm environment. These days, she works at a highly prestigious national law firm and has a billable rate of close to $600 an hour. Of course, at this rate, Sue's clients expect to obtain quality representation and, having been a client of hers when I was an in-house corporate attorney, I know that my friend is a great patent attorney and gives excellent service. As an IP Business Strategist and Consultant, I am no longer engaged on a daily basis in working with clients to obtain patents. In this IP
Corporate Managers: Are You Failing to Obtain Maximum Value from Your Energy Savings and Green Innovations by Ignoring Patent Issues?
In this world of ever rising energy costs, your company likely has one or more teams of people working to reduce energy consumption and improve the efficiency of your company's processes. Your company is also probably working diligently on ways to make your operations more "green." For example, if your company exhibits a large carbon footprint in its manufacturing processes, someone in your organization is likely thinking about ways to reduce your carbon emissions in advance of the possible adoption of government-mandated carbon cap and trade system directed to fight global climate change. However, because the external forces of energy costs and possible governmental regulation are driving these and green innovations inside your company, it is quite likely that these efforts are occurring outside of normal R&D channels. That is, your company's Manufacturing, Operations and Logistics personnel are likely responsible for developing and testing these potential new innovations, and for