Excavate fossils to make your reservation – is IP lost in translation?
Working on upcoming trips to Japan, China, Singapore and Malaysia and a few clunky machine translations later, it made me stop and think about the IP communication issue from another angle.
We’ve often talked about the need to use a common language, and the language of business. Sure.
Communication isn’t just words. It’s culture, it’s body language, it’s positioning and so many other things. The culture and positioning of the IP world at large at the moment has got more than a few feathers ruffled (see Mary Adam’s comment on this blog post for example and for a good illustrator of why this may be justified see some of the comments further below).
More than anything, the IP world needs to stop yelling and start listening to the culture(s) they are trying to communicate with. That’s the broader community and the business world. IP needs to grow bigger ears.
If not, you might as well be saying "The use of closed school buildings in the atmosphere, let us make a grilled family!"
(Footnote – both garbled messages were taken straight from machine translations.)
[Photo credit: seanomatopoeia]
One Comment on “Excavate fossils to make your reservation – is IP lost in translation?”
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Hi Duncan
A while since I’ve visited. As ever this comment is right on the money.
Over at Tangible IP we’ve been on this point this week too. IFRS3 gives those who approach this from the legal end of the spectrum all the help and guidance needed to speak this common language. Intangibles. Its so easy.
Its not, repeat not, patents. The sooner the legal end of the spectrum realises this, the sooner we move from neanderthal level to a basic level of understanding.
As a tip to any organisation starting out with some new fangled idea of doing advanced patent ratings (use whatever metric you want, this is wasting your time).