Hidden Rembrandts and nascent da Vinci’s - building value by creating and capturing IP

Copyright Friday, August 25, 2006 Duncan Bucknell Company

The following four simple steps can dramatically improve your ability to create and capture intellectual property (whether it relates to inventions, brands, works of art, know-how or whatever):

1. create an IP-Conscious Culture;
2. set up an easy-to-use knowledge base system;
3. have regular IP-generation & capture meetings; and
4. put it all through a robust evaluation process.

Comment

Intellectual property strategy is invaluable in leveraging business strategy. A few simple steps can dramatically improve your ability to create and capture intellectual property.

Just to be clear, this applies to all forms of intellectual property, not just invention disclosure.

Here are just a few things to think about to increase the IP value generated and captured by your organization.

1 - An IP-Conscious Culture

Creating a culture that enshrines the value of IP and energizes people to create and capture it is critical. To do this, the organization needs to have at least a basic understanding of intellectual property - for a simplified model, see my article Analysing IP Put Simply

However, the rationale for creating and capturing IP must to be understood and continuously communicated from the very top of the organization.

If you really want to make this work, then reward people for creating and capturing intellectual property. (I’m not saying that this always has to be financial — people are motivated by many different things.)

Ideally, a single person on the senior executive team should have overall responsibility for intellectual property management, including IP capture.

2 - An easy-to-use knowledge database

A central knowledge database can greatly enhance generation and capture of ideas and associated intellectual property. Ideally the system will be electronic, easy to use and accessible by all people in the organization. It should be a repository for all ideas for improvements, new brands, products, customers, whatever.

The system should track who generates the ideas, further ideas or improvements to them, and if possible, manage the process of evaluating ideas for follow up. This can all be done relatively easily on the organization’s intranet.

To be clear, such a system should cater for the traditional ‘invention disclosure process’, but much more as well.

3 - Get together regularly

Ideas are best generated in groups of people (see for example Edward de Bono’s work). So, holding regular meetings to discuss ideas is very useful. Meetings should be attended by people from a variety of backgrounds within the organization (eg. Marketing, Sales, Business Development, Finance, Legal, Product Development, Manufacturing, etc.).

An IP specialist should attend these meetings and contribute to the discussion. This person could equally be an employee or external counsel.

4 - A transparent evaluation process

Captured ideas must be evaluated for usefulness. To minimize wasted time, use a staged evaluation process to screen for success factors such as (a) feasibility, (b) alignment with business strategy, (c) technical merit, (d) potential commercial value to other entities.

The process should be clearly understood and visible to everyone in the organization (and so should the reward system described above).

The evaluation process will help you decide whether to pursue the idea, and if so how. For example:

• is it worthy of formal IP protection? (patent, trade mark, design registration, etc)
• should it be utilized internally?
• should it be captured and then out-licensed?
• which aspect of our business strategy does this align with?
• which of our current customers would benefit from this?
• which markets would this be particularly beneficial in?
• etc