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....

A navigator seen from behind at a ship's chart table at dawn, the plotted route ending mid-chart, open sea ahead.

Long-lived patents, an AI-shifted landscape: why a fixed filing roadmap fails, and the three decision rules an IP strategy needs instead.

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...

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When a market is about to triple in a decade, the patent filing map you drew for yesterday’s demand is the one that will let you down. A McKinsey analysis, written...

Glass vault door ajar revealing a glowing lattice of light inside, with robotic arms reflected — trade secrets theme.

If AI can do the work, what exactly does your company still own? That is the question sitting underneath McKinsey’s new report, The symbiotic enterprise, which argues that AI agents and...

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...

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A new technology hits a point where the question stops being whether it works and becomes who already owns the ground around it. Quantum computing has recently crossed that line. McKinsey’s...

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Most companies pouring money into AI are getting almost nothing back — and the reason is strategic, not technical. In “When Developing an AI Strategy, Beware the Urgency Trap” (HBR, July...