The patent is rarely where the money is decided. The licence is. Three IP developments from the past week make that point, and each turns on terms settled, or left unsettled,...

Scientist in a lab coat, seen from behind, looks through glass at robotic production equipment.

If AI collapses the cost of making your product, the question is no longer how cheaply you can make it. It is what stops a competitor making the same thing. That...

Engineer on a raised walkway looking over long factory production lines, with pylons visible beyond the windows

There are two ways to hold a position in a technology. You can own the technology. Or you can own what it takes to build and install the technology at volume....

Engineer seen from behind holds a small device up to a window overlooking city office towers at dusk.

Adding AI to a product is not a strategy. Moving to where the value is going is. And every real move changes what your company controls, which makes it an IP...

Scientist in a lab coat, seen from behind, placing a vial into a long lit sample rack in a dim laboratory. (107 characters)

A treatment that works once and keeps working for years is a very different commercial asset from a pill taken every day. The value is created up front. It then has...

An engineer seen from behind reaches past rows of identical white prototypes toward one differently shaped object.

Patent law only pays for outliers. Novelty and inventive step exist to screen out the expected, so a patent portfolio is, by design, a collection of exceptions. Hold that thought against...

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...

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...