Developer at a desk in a dark office comparing a licence document on paper with code on a lit screen

The price of frontier AI capability is falling towards zero. The consequence for an IP strategy is not that AI has become cheaper. It is that anything you thought you were...

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 in silhouette on a riverbank at dusk, watching traffic cross an older bridge beside a new empty one

A patent protects a mechanism. It does not protect a share of the benefit. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where a great deal of intellectual property...

Engineer seen from behind writing in a lab notebook at a bench, with a gold quantum computer cryostat behind.

A technical lead is worth what you can prove. Being first, or fastest, or best matters only if the evidence behind the claim survives a hostile reading, whether from a court,...

Engineer seen from behind in a dark operations centre, watching one bright monitor among a curved bank of screens.

Capability is not what separates an attacker from a defender. Incentives are. Ben Thompson’s Stratechery piece of 24 August 2026 works this through in agentic cybersecurity, and the logic travels a...

A customer seen from behind walking out of an empty marble banking hall, lit smartphone in hand.

Global banking has just posted the most profitable year of any industry – US$1.3 trillion in net income – and still trades at the lowest price-to-book of any industry. McKinsey’s preview...

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.

Executive seen from behind lifting three lit note cards from a wall crowded with blank red cards in a dim office.

Most IP portfolios are not shaped by strategy. They are shaped by whatever was urgent that week. Renewals get paid because the deadline arrived. Examination responses get filed because the clock...

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...

Engineer in a hard hat walks past rows of high-voltage transformers in a large electrical equipment factory

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...