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 long way past security. An attacker’s automated agent carries positive expected value. If the exploit fails, nothing has changed. If it lands once, the attack has paid for itself. A defender’s automation carries the opposite. A good patch only preserves the status quo, while a bad one breaks the software or opens a fresh hole. So offence automates completely, defence keeps a human in the loop, and no human in the loop keeps pace with an agent. Thompson then applies the same asymmetry to incumbents and startups. An established company judges AI by the mistake it might make, so AI stays a productivity tool. A startup, whose base case is failure already, has nothing to lose by automating everything. Same tools, different incentives, very different outcomes.
What this means for IP strategy
The durable lesson is that this risk calculus is quietly setting your filing decisions as well as your deployment decisions. Three things follow.
– The defender’s advantage is ownable. Only the defender holds the code, the dependency map and the operational telemetry. That advantage compounds only if it is captured – patents over the closed remediation loop of detect, propose, deploy and roll back, and controlled trade secrets over the pipelines and data that make the loop work. It is the same pattern as in When Everyone Can Run the Model: What Open-Weight AI Means for Your IP Strategy – once the capability commoditises, what is left to own is the machinery around it.
– The human you remove from the loop was also doing IP work. They knew what was confidential, what was privileged and where a draft came from. Take them out without rebuilding the controls and the reasonable steps your trade secret protection rests on leave with them, which is the exposure in Your AI Agent Won’t Keep a Secret.
– The incentive gap shows up on the register. Companies treating AI as a productivity gain file nothing new. AI-native entrants file around workflows that did not exist two years ago, which is the ownership question in When Anyone Can Build It in an Afternoon, What’s Left to Own?.
The useful question for your next board paper is not how much AI you have deployed. It is what you filed, and what you locked down. Caution about deploying is defensible. Caution about owning is a slower way to lose the same position.
Read the article: Autonomy and Innovation, Ben Thompson, Stratechery, 24 August 2026.
A rebrand does not just launch a new name. It starts a clock on the old one. Stop using a trade mark, show no intention of going back to it, and the law can treat it as abandoned. At that point a competitor can pick it up, together with the brand equity you spent years building. That is the trade mark abandonment risk most rebranding plans never mention.
A nice example comes from the ruling in the Delaware federal court in the dispute between X Corp and Operation Bluebird, a startup that set out to relaunch the old Twitter brand. The judge granted X a preliminary injunction over the TWITTER name itself. On the word TWEET and the blue bird logo, X lost. The court found the startup likely to prove that X had discontinued genuine use of both and did not intend to resume it. The startup renamed its platform Tweet.app the same day, having already taken more than 172,000 handle requests before launch.
Rebranding without losing your trade marks
The strategic point is that the abandoned assets were not dead assets. Two were valuable enough for a challenger to build a business on. The TWEET mark and the bird still carried more recognition than most companies ever earn, and they were left on the table.
Three things worth taking from it:
– Abandonment is a question of conduct, not intent. A rebrand memo does not preserve the old marks. Continued genuine use does. Where the old brand still has value, keep it in real commercial use somewhere, even at small scale, or decide deliberately to let it go.
– Different marks fail separately. X kept TWITTER because it kept using it. The word, the logo and the product vocabulary each stand or fall on their own record of use, so an audit after a rebrand has to go mark by mark.
– The public does not rebrand on instruction. “Tweet” stayed in everyday speech long after the company dropped it. Where the market keeps using your old name, a competitor adopting it gets recognition for free.
Most countries run the same logic on a fixed timetable. Once a registered trade mark has gone without genuine use for a set period, usually three to five years, anyone can apply to have it removed. A rebrand starts that period running on every mark it retires.
The mistake is treating retired brand assets as sunk cost. Walking Away From a Brand Doesn’t Always Mean You’ve Let It Go set out the challenge when it was filed. It is not a new weakness either. No brand protection – Twitters greatest challenge? flagged the thin protection around the bird and the word “tweet” in 2009. And it is the same pattern as The Quiet Decay: Why IP Value Slips When No One Is Watching – the loss came from inattention, not from a stronger opponent.
Before the next rebrand, list every mark being retired, decide for each whether it is kept in use, licensed or released, and put someone’s name against the decision. Otherwise the market, and eventually a court, will decide for you.
Read the article: Judge blocks X rival from using Twitter name, but allows ‘Tweet’ for now, Sarah Perez, TechCrunch.
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 of its Global Banking Annual Review 2026 reads that gap plainly: investors are delighted with the results and unconvinced the advantage will last.
The report shows why. Banking’s real competitive moat was never property. It was inertia – trust built over decades, relationships too tangled to unwind, customers who never got around to chasing a better rate. Four forces reached a tipping point in 2025, and every one attacks that inertia directly. Mature fintechs have taken 17 per cent of the revenue they share with the top thousand banks. Neobanks like Nubank (131 million customers) and Revolut (69 million) now beat incumbents on growth, on returns and, increasingly, on trust. Stablecoins loosen the deposit base. And agentic AI dissolves stickiness itself: software agents that monitor balances in real time, sweep idle cash into higher-yield accounts, shift card balances and compare products while the customer sleeps. Banks survived the internet and the smartphone by moving at the pace of their older, high-value customers. That grace period is gone – generative AI reached roughly half of US working-age adults within three years, across every age group at once. When technology can dissolve your switching costs without infringing a single right you hold, what remains is what you actually own.
When inertia dissolves, ownership decides: the intellectual property strategy lesson
The durable lesson is not about banking. Any business whose advantage rests on habit, incumbency or switching costs is holding a moat that technology can drain without ever infringing it, because inertia cannot be registered, licensed or enforced.
Now look at where McKinsey says the surviving value sits – hyperpersonalised engagement built on proprietary customer data, platforms that reach beyond the core product, agentic operations, a three-speed innovation portfolio – and you are reading a list of intangible assets. Each one is protectable: the data and the models trained on it, the operational know-how as trade secrets, the platform technology as patents, and the brand that customers and their AI agents must still choose to trust as registered trade marks. It is the same shift I examined in When AI Does the Shopping, What Does Your Brand Actually Own? – when an AI intermediary sits between you and the customer, owned rights are what travel – and in When Everyone Can Run the Model: What Open-Weight AI Means for Your IP Strategy – when a capability commoditises, value moves to cost position, proprietary data and whoever owns the customer relationship. Banks already spend more on technology than the next four sectors combined; the strategic question is how much of that spend ends the year as owned, enforceable assets rather than vendor licences and undocumented practice – the discipline set out in When AI is embedded in your Workforce, Trade Secrets Become the Strategy. Three questions for your next strategy review, whatever your industry:
– Which parts of your customer relationship would survive the arrival of an AI agent acting for that customer, and which are merely habit?
– What did last year’s technology spend leave behind that you own – filings, controlled trade secrets, data rights – rather than rent?
– If a competitor can buy the same AI you can, what in your stack could they still not copy?
Investors are already pricing the answers. The time to convert record profits into owned advantage is while the profits are still records.
Read the article: Global Banking Annual Review 2026: Precision with speed, McKinsey & Company, 21 May 2026.
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 to be defended for decades. That turns the patent vs trade secret question into a horizon question, and it is one every IP strategy should answer before the first filing.
The prompt is a Phase 1 result reported by Cleveland Clinic last month. CTX310, a single-infusion CRISPR therapy developed by CRISPR Therapeutics, switches off the ANGPTL3 gene in the liver. At the highest dose, LDL cholesterol fell 52.5 per cent and triglycerides 47.8 per cent, and the effect held for the full year with no serious treatment-related adverse events. Fifteen patients, early days. But the shape of the asset is already clear.
Durability of effect needs durability of protection
A one-time therapy has no repeat prescription to price. The return has to come from exclusivity over the years in which the market adopts it. The same logic applies outside medicine: a process change, a formulation or an algorithm that permanently lowers a cost base earns over a long horizon, and the protection has to last as long as the earnings do.
The two main forms of protection run on different clocks:
– A patent runs for a fixed term, 20 years from filing, in return for full public disclosure. It does not depend on secrecy surviving, it can be licensed or sold, and it can be enforced against a competitor who develops the same thing independently. But it ends on a known date, and everyone can read it.
– A trade secret has no expiry, but only while the secret holds. It needs constant defending through access controls, contracts and exit procedures, and it gives no remedy against reverse engineering or independent development.
For a therapy that will pass through regulators, clinical publication and contract manufacturers, secrecy for the core invention was never realistic. The gene target, the editing construct and the delivery formulation are patent territory. The manufacturing know-how may be better kept confidential. The decision is rarely one or the other. It is which parts get which form of protection, and how long each will actually hold.
Three questions follow for any board looking at an innovation with a long tail:
– Over what horizon does this earn, and does the protection last that long? The Five-Year IP Roadmap Is Over: How to Build an IP Strategy for a Future You Can’t Predict makes the point that patents outlive most product plans, so the filing has to be written for year 15, not only for today.
– What will the product, the regulator or the customer reveal? Anything they will reveal cannot be a trade secret. What remains genuinely hidden needs the discipline described in When AI is embedded in your Workforce, Trade Secrets Become the Strategy.
– How will exclusivity be extended once the first patent runs down? In pharmaceuticals the answer is layered filings over a public timetable, as The Pharmaceutical Patent Cliff Has a Timetable – And It’s Public shows.
Decide which clock each innovation is running on, then make sure someone is watching it. A result that lasts for decades is only worth what the protection around it lasts.
Read the article: Cleveland Clinic First-In-Human Trial of CRISPR Gene-Editing Therapy Shown to Safely and Continuously Lower Cholesterol and Triglycerides After One Year, Cleveland Clinic Newsroom.
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 new research from Harvard, Wharton, Northwestern and Columbia, published in Harvard Business Review on 14 August 2026, on what generative AI actually does inside the innovation pipeline. The finding is uncomfortable: used naively, AI deepens the human bottlenecks it is meant to remove. In ideation, a model gravitates to the statistically typical answer – and once a person reads that answer, they fixate on it and produce fewer unusual ideas than they would have unprompted.
Because most models draw on similar training data, independent teams at different companies converge on the same handful of design directions: individual productivity rises while collective diversity falls. Screening compounds the problem, because committees mistake AI fluency for quality and fund the polished pitch over the original one. For anyone responsible for intellectual property, the translation is blunt. The statistically typical idea is the unpatentable idea.
An innovation pipeline that quietly optimises for the expected is manufacturing prior art, not property. And convergence carries a second cost: the same “invention” is being generated at the same time inside your competitors’ businesses, and in a first-to-file world, whoever turns it into a patent application first owns it.
What AI convergence means for invention harvesting and patent strategy
The durable lessons are about process design, not tool selection.
First, audit the output. Map the past twelve months of invention disclosures and patent filings against the landscape: if your applications cluster where everyone else’s do, AI has homogenised your R&D without anyone deciding it should – and using the tools was never the moat, as I argued in AI Isn’t Your Advantage—Your IP Strategy Is.
Second, redesign the funnel for outliers. The research shows that prompting a model deliberately toward bolder, more distinct territory works, while telling a fixated human to “think more broadly” does not – so build divergence into the machine step, score invention disclosures blind to their polish, and keep a human genuinely directing the inventive work. That last discipline is also what inventorship law demands of a patent that has to survive challenge.
Third, guard the loop itself. The researchers describe an automation trap in which ideation, screening and testing are all mediated by models trained on each other’s output, and the whole system drifts from reality – the same failure of human ownership I examined in AI Transformation Is Not a Strategy Problem — It’s an Ownership Problem. And when a capability is available to everyone, value moves to what cannot be downloaded – the pattern from When Anyone Can Build It in an Afternoon, What’s Left to Own?.
The closing test is simple. If your innovation pipeline would generate the same ideas as your competitor’s, you no longer have an R&D advantage – you have a subscription.
Read the article: Research: The Innovation Problems AI Can’t Solve, Julian De Freitas, Ayelet Israeli, Gideon Nave, Artem Timoshenko and Olivier Toubia, Harvard Business Review, 14 August 2026.
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. Bayer’s move into hybrid wheat this year is a clean example, and a useful test of any IP licensing strategy. The world’s largest seed company already runs its own hybrid wheat breeding programme and an established North American wheat franchise. It has still taken an exclusive licence to RAGT’s elite European wheat germplasm rather than breeding an equivalent or buying the French company outright. The stated ambition is a launch in the early 2030s and sales of up to a billion euros a year by the mid-2040s.
Why licence? Germplasm is the genetic base material a breeder starts from. Elite germplasm adapted to European growing conditions is the product of decades of selection, and no amount of capital compresses those decades. RAGT’s head of R&D said the deal reflects the value of genetics its breeders built up over that time. Bayer’s own wheat breeder put it plainly: they chose to license from RAGT because RAGT leads in Europe. For a company that wants to be selling seed by the early 2030s, the licence was the only route that arrived in time.
What a build, buy or licence decision looks like when time is the constraint
The durable lesson is that the licence is not the fallback option here. It is the strategy. Three disciplines follow, and none of them is specific to agriculture.
– Separate the inputs that are money-bound from the inputs that are time-bound. A plant, a sales force or a data centre can be bought. Decades of adapted breeding, a validated clinical dataset or a certified process cannot. Time-bound inputs are licensing decisions, and they need to be priced before the launch date is announced, because once the market knows your timetable the leverage sits with the licensor. As I argued in Capacity Is Not a Moat: What India’s Electrification Build-Out Means for Your IP Strategy, the in-licence is priced from the weakest seat once the capital is committed.
– If you are the one holding the time-bound asset, licensing beats selling. RAGT keeps its genetics, converts decades of breeding into a revenue line, and retains the option to license elsewhere by territory and crop class. That is the position I described in The Cash Behind the Compute: the asset that cannot be acquired on demand is the one everyone else must come to you for.
– Follow the value downstream. A hybrid bred several generations from licensed material blends RAGT genetics, Bayer breeding technology and new data. Much of that sits in know-how and breeding records protected by confidentiality and contract rather than by registered rights. So the agreement has to say who owns the new varieties, the improvements and the data, and who may use them outside the collaboration. Those clauses decide who is paid in the 2040s, and they are being written now.
Which inputs to your next product can only be licensed, and was that licence priced before the timetable went public?
Read the article: Bayer-RAGT IP Licensing Agreement Expands Hybrid Wheat Strategy, Pejman Javaheri, Juris Law Group.
A patent can outlive four corporate strategies, three CEOs and every market assumption it was filed under. Yet most intellectual property portfolios are still planned the way careers used to be – pick a destination, build a roadmap, work steadily towards it.
Writing in Harvard Business Review on 10 August 2026, London Business School professor Lynda Gratton argues that this style of planning has quietly stopped working for executive careers, because two long-term shifts are compounding: working lives are stretching, and AI is making the future of work unpredictable. Her answer is not a better plan. It is a set of decision rules that hold up when the destination keeps moving: run small, low-risk experiments before change forces your hand; invest in the capabilities and relationships that compound over time; and protect time for reflection so that judgement, not momentum, makes the important calls.
Swap “career” for “patent portfolio” and the diagnosis lands even harder. Patents run for twenty years – far longer than most product strategies now survive – and AI is redrawing the technology landscape those filings were meant to cover. A five-year filing roadmap aimed at a fixed destination is a plan for a future that has already declined to cooperate.
What decision rules look like in patent portfolio management
Gratton’s three rules translate directly into IP strategy:
– Experiment before events force commitment. Provisional patent applications, staged filing programs and pilot licences are the IP system’s built-in instruments for buying options cheaply – a provisional is a twelve-month option on a direction you are not yet sure of, and a PCT application defers the expensive jurisdiction calls while the market shows its hand. That is the discipline between betting the whole budget and doing nothing, and doing nothing is getting dearer, as I argued in Why “Wait and See” Is Becoming the Most Expensive IP Decision You Can Make.
– Fund what compounds. Invention harvesting, inventor relationships, trade secret capture and clean chain of title grow more valuable every year they are maintained – and they are exactly the work that gets squeezed when the renewals deadline shouts loudest, the pattern I examined in When Everything Is Urgent, Your IP Portfolio Decides Itself.
– Protect the judgement. The decisions that actually shape portfolio value – what to stop renewing, which jurisdictions no longer earn their place, patent versus trade secret – deserve scheduled reflection, and ideally rehearsal against futures you did not plan for, the exercise I described in Could Your IP Strategy Survive a Wargame?.
A portfolio built on a prediction is only as good as the prediction. A portfolio built on decision rules – optionality bought early, compounding assets funded first, judgement protected from urgency – gets stronger the less predictable the future becomes. If your IP strategy still assumes you know where the business will be in ten years, that is the assumption to review first.
Read the article: The Predictable Executive Career Arc Is Over, Lynda Gratton, Harvard Business Review, 10 August 2026.
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 products it is usually wrong.
A recent analysis on DrugPatentWatch works through the loss-of-exclusivity histories of Revlimid, Humira, Eliquis and Keytruda and finds no cliff anywhere in them. Exclusivity ends in steps. A patent term extension here. A secondary or formulation patent there. A settlement date that matches no patent’s printed expiry. A regulatory exclusivity running on its own clock. Humira’s compound patent expired in December 2016. The first US biosimilar launched in January 2023. A forecast keyed to the compound patent was out by more than six years.
Why the exclusivity timeline beats the patent expiry date
The steps are the interesting part, because they are built rather than granted. Revlimid’s generics entered under volume caps fixed by settlement, not by any patent. Eliquis produced two different entry years for the same drug, years apart, depending only on whether a challenger settled or kept litigating. Merck is building a subcutaneous formulation ahead of Keytruda’s core expiry, and that defensive move has already drawn a fresh infringement fight of its own. Every step traces back to a decision someone took years earlier about what to file, what to extend, what to settle and what to reformulate.
Three things follow, and none of them are specific to pharmaceuticals:
– Model the timeline, not the date. What matters commercially is when competition arrives at full strength, and that number is nowhere on the front page of the patent. The Australian extension record makes the same point from the other side, as I set out in The Pharmaceutical Patent Cliff Has a Timetable — And It’s Public: many molecules are defended by three or more separately extended patents, and those dates are a published calendar of when each competitor becomes vulnerable.
– Treat the settlement date as the operative date, and structure it with that in mind. It usually controls, it can fall before the last patent expires, and it carries a long tail of risk – the lesson of The Reverse Payment You Didn’t Know You Made, where the economics of a deal signed in 2014 were still being unwound more than a decade later.
– Build the second layer while the first still has years to run. Formulation, method-of-use, device and delivery rights are what turn one date into several. The discipline is claiming every commercially viable variant before a competitor carves around you, as When Your Strongest Asset Is What You Leave Off the Label shows.
A step you negotiated is also a step someone can take from you. A listed patent is not a tested one, a settlement can be reopened, and a reformulation can invite a new opponent with a portfolio of its own.
So the useful question for your next board paper is not when the patent expires. It is what your exclusivity timeline actually looks like, which steps you built deliberately, and which ones you are relying on without ever having decided to.
Read the article: The Patent Cliff Is a Myth. What Actually Happens Is a Patent Staircase, and Most Models Miss the Steps, DrugPatentWatch.
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 it, because the moment you decide to stop using a mark, retire a product line, or settle a patent fight is precisely the moment your IP position is being tested – whether you notice or not.
Start with Twitter. A Virginia startup called Operation Bluebird has launched Twitter.now, reviving the old blue bird branding under the argument that X Corp abandoned the Twitter and Tweet trademarks when it rebranded in 2023. X disagrees, and is suing in Delaware federal court. What makes this more than a curiosity is a Delaware judge’s comment from the bench earlier this year that X “appears to have abandoned” its rights in Tweet and the bird logo, and possibly the word Twitter itself. No written order has issued, and the case is unresolved. But the lesson doesn’t wait for a verdict: trademark rights are use-based, not sentiment-based. If your business retires a name, a logo, or an old product line, someone else can start building a case that you gave it up – and “we didn’t mean to” is not a defence courts take seriously. Decide deliberately whether you’re keeping a mark alive, and keep evidence of continued use if you are.
Second, Huawei and HP have signed a multiyear global patent cross-licensing deal covering Wi-Fi technology, including the new Wi-Fi 7 standard. This resolves a dispute that started in 2025 when Huawei sued HP over Wi-Fi 6 patents at the Unified Patent Court. Nobody walked away from anything here – HP is paying for continued access, and both sides now hold reciprocal rights to each other’s portfolios. It’s a clean example of patent litigation doing exactly the job it’s designed for: turning an infringement standoff into a priced, ongoing commercial relationship. If your products touch standardised technology, you are already inside someone else’s licensing model, whether you’ve mapped it or not. The interesting move is asking, before a dispute forces the question, whose patents you’re already relying on and what a licence would cost if they came knocking first.
Third, the EUIPO’s Board of Appeal has confirmed that a well-known brand can defeat a copycat purely on reputation, without the earlier mark even needing to cover the same goods. Rovio successfully cancelled a gambling-industry trade mark that echoed Angry Birds’ colour scheme, character design and “crashing birds” concept, on the basis that the applicant’s dishonest intent could be inferred from the strength of Rovio’s reputation alone. This is a materially easier enforcement path than most brand owners realise exists: you don’t need a matching registration if your reputation does the work instead. It also means the return on building genuine brand recognition compounds in ways beyond marketing – it becomes a legal asset in its own right.
The pattern across all three: IP rights are shaped by what you actually do, documented and provable, not by what you intended. X Corp’s intentions about Twitter don’t matter if its conduct reads as abandonment. Huawei’s and HP’s dispute didn’t need to end in court once both sides priced the alternative. Rovio’s decades of visible brand-building is now doing enforcement work that no registration alone could achieve.
None of this is really about trademarks or patents specifically – it’s about whether your IP strategy is a record of decisions you actually made, or a set of assumptions nobody has tested. The three questions worth asking this week:
(1) What have we stopped using that we haven’t formally decided to abandon?
(2) Whose technology are we relying on without a licence? and
(3) Is our own reputation strong enough to do enforcement work if a registration alone won’t cut it?
Related reading: Why IP Strategies Fail: The Gap Between the Decision and the Portfolio, The $60,000 Business Name: Why an ASIC Search Is Not a Trade Mark Search and Who Gets Paid for the Platform? Lessons From a Big Week in AI and Intellectual Property.
Sources for this post
- Twitter.now / X Corp v Operation Bluebird – TechCrunch, 27 August 2026; primary docket at CourtListener, X Corp. v. Operation Bluebird, Inc., 1:25-cv-01510.
- Huawei/HP Wi-Fi patent cross-licence – Huawei press release, 26 August 2026; South China Morning Post commentary.
- EUIPO Angry Birds bad faith decision – EUIPO Board of Appeal decision R1791/2025-4; The IPKat, 27 August 2026.
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 was running. Meanwhile, the decisions that actually determine the value of an intellectual property portfolio – what to stop protecting, which jurisdictions no longer earn their place, which inventions justify the next filing – wait for a quiet month that never comes.
Writing in Harvard Business Review on 27 July 2026, executive coach Karen Walker gives this condition a name: ambient urgency. It is the chronic, low-grade state in which everything feels critical, nothing can wait, and decision quality quietly degrades. Her prescription is not another prioritisation framework. It is three tests to run before committing your attention: the replacement test (am I making this decision because only I can make it, or because I am the default?), the compounding test (will this create value that grows over time, or does it just relieve today’s pressure?) and the fear test (am I deferring this call because it is wrong, or because I don’t want to face its consequences?).
What the three tests look like in IP portfolio management
Run those tests against your portfolio and the results are usually uncomfortable. Renewal decisions made by habit fail the replacement test – as I argued in Why IP Strategies Fail: The Gap Between the Decision and the Portfolio, most companies’ IP spending correlates more than 90% with last year’s, which means nobody is really deciding at all. Invention harvesting, inventor relationships and trade secret capture pass the compounding test, and they are exactly the work ambient urgency squeezes out first – the slow erosion I described in The Quiet Decay: Why IP Value Slips When No One Is Watching. And portfolio pruning fails the fear test almost everywhere. Abandoning a granted patent or dropping a jurisdiction reads as an admission that an earlier decision no longer holds, so a company keeps paying renewals in fourteen countries for a product line it exited three years ago. Three questions are worth putting to your next patent portfolio review or IP audit:
– Which IP decisions genuinely need you – the patent-versus-trade-secret calls, the enforcement calls, the direction-setting – and which are you making by default?
– What in this year’s IP budget compounds, and what merely keeps the machine turning?
– What are we still protecting only because ending it would feel like failure?
The test of clear allocation is the same one that applies to any capital decision – the discipline I explored in The Bet You Make Before You Make Any Bet. An IP strategy is a record of trade-offs, made consciously. If your portfolio only ever grows, urgency is making your decisions for you.
Read the article: 3 Questions to Pressure-Test Your Priorities, Karen Walker, Harvard Business Review, 27 July 2026.
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