How You Can Be a Top Player in IP in 3 “Easy Steps”

As a forward-thinking business strategist, you will be interested in the reprinted article published in the Summer 2007 Sloan Management Review entitled “Patenting for Profits” (available in this link: sloanreview.mit.edu/wsj/insight/pdfs/48409.pdf). This article, which was written by two partners at Bain & Company, presents a very succinct explanation of the elements needed for a company to become a top player in the IP game.

As an IP Strategist and owner of an IP Strategy and Consulting services (more info here: http://www.jackiehutter/, I believe this article clearly lays out the necessary features for your company to create and deploy a patent strategy that will maximize your corporate assets. To summarize this article, as a top player in creating value from patents, you will create and deploy an infrastructure having each of these elements: 1) a strong market focus; 2) a holistic view; and 3) a strong organization.

When your organization has a strong market focus, you expend effort only on those markets that are the most important to you. Also, your market focused organization ensures “freedom of action” so that your innovation can be used as desired. To have this freedom of action, you must understand the patent playing field in your markets of interest, as well as what patent rights you need to compete in these spaces. In short, your collection and exploitation of patent information is paramount to ensure that you can exploit your innovation to the fullest extent you desire.

A holistic view means that you understand the reason for and value of each patent that you obtain or acquire. Further, you can articulate how you will attain or extract value from your patents. The value extracted from your patents can be the exclusive right to sell your patented product, or it can be from licensing for royalty payments or cross-licensing to others as “bargaining chips.” In other words, just as you can articulate how you extract value from your other corporate assets (e.g., new products, facilities, etc.), you can explain how each of your patents affects your corporate bottom line.

When you stress organization, you set up clear roles and accountabilities for strategy, IP and R&D. When you are a top player in IP, these functions operate as a team, where each function regularly has input into the decisions of the others. Significantly, your IP specialists must be part of product development teams, R&D and other corporate teams critical to value creation.
Put another way, your IP specialists are not just patent lawyers; instead they are critical to your patent asset realization team.As a top player in IP you will apply these 3 concepts consistently at all levels of the organization, namely, the company or business unit, the product line and the invention. The result will be a rigorous, highly strategic approach to IP management.

Of course, these really are not really “3 Easy Steps”. Indeed, successful creation and deployment of a value creation-focused patent strategy will require your organization to be exceedingly disciplined and to expend significant effort over an extended period of time. But when you are a top player in IP, you won’t have to trumpet your success the world—the marketplace will do this for you.