Wheat breeder seen from behind at dawn, looking across rows of small breeding trial plots stretching to the horizon.

Some assets cannot be built on any timeline a budget can shorten. When that is true, the choice is no longer build, buy or licence. It is licence, or stay out....

Engineer seen from behind on a lit industrial steel staircase, landings receding above and below

Most boards plan around a single date. The patent expires, competitors arrive, the revenue line falls off a ledge. That model is tidy, it sits in the forecast, and for high-value...

Person seen from behind walking down a dim archive aisle of shelved boxes, holding a lit tablet.

Intellectual property rights don’t dissolve the moment you stop paying attention to them. That’s the thread running through several developments last week, and it’s worth more attention than most companies give...

Technician seen from behind in a dark data centre, looking down a long aisle of lit server racks.

If a capability you spent years building can be downloaded on a Sunday afternoon, the question is not how to stop that. It is what you own that survives it. Ben...

Red figurine on a dark surface, its reflection repeating through frosted glass panels, symbolising brand protection.

Here is an uncomfortable number for anyone responsible for brand protection: when consumers ask an AI tool about a brand, the brand’s own website supplies only 1–2 per cent of the...

The most expensive failures in R&D are not the projects that fail. They are the projects that should never have started — and the ones that limp along because nobody had...

A single transparent glass box lit by a spotlight in a dark archive of identical grey boxes, symbolising AI brand visibility.

When a customer asks an AI assistant what to buy, does your brand come up as an answer? New research from Georgetown and Darden, published in Harvard Business Review as “How...

A dimly lit data centre corridor lined with illuminated server racks, a lone figure in silhouette standing among them.

July was a month about ownership. Not compliance, not litigation skill – ownership. Google’s edge sits on TPU technology that competitors must come back and license. Sanofi lost the mRNA product...

Hands pressing a brass seal onto a certificate on a wooden desk, with red and brown ribbons beside it – trade mark registration.

Once your trade mark is registered, how safe is it? For its first twelve months, less safe than most brand owners assume – the Registrar of Trade Marks holds a power...

Appraiser seen from behind writing in a ledger beside an old hardcover book in a bright library workroom.

What happens when intellectual property built into your products turns out to belong to someone else? This week supplied three expensive answers. Each involved one of the world’s most powerful companies...