You do your best work when you can sit down quietly and focus on the task at hand.

It’s the same with IP strategy of course.  You need to focus your attention, highly tune it to the situation before you.   Identify what you’re trying to achieve, work out what you need to do to get there, then focus and prioritise these things according to the magnitude of their effect on achieving the objective.

What’s the single most effective thing you could do?  What’s the most effective way to achieve it – it’s often indirect.  Perhaps you need to gain internal support to threaten or commence litigation in a heretofore unheard of location – just to nail your competitor’s supply chain with a customs seizure – just so you can bring them to the table to talk sensibly…  Maybe the most effective thing you should do in that scenario is effectively communicate with the internal decision makers…

Perhaps you need to start collaborating with that erstwhile competitor so that you can leverage each other’s technology.  Sounds crazy?  Maybe there’s an even bigger threat of an alternative to your current solution that you should work on together?

Who knows?

Focusing on the situation, at length, prioritising and actioning is going to move your forward.   To really increase your effectiveness, you should of course attack the top 3 or 4 in parallel.

[Image credit: DarkPaul | Thinking | ]