Duncan Bucknell

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M&A

Mergers and Acquisitions are a key source of strategic value in business. You can make an enormous contribution to M&A.  Its a simple thing to set up a scan for valuable technology and IP using standard databases. Stay in touch with the M&A team, understand what they’re looking for today and help them find it. If the deal is on, you will have a head start on the due diligence process, and… Read More

An act of deception has won many a military battle – from Sun Tzu to the Trojan Horse, from Alexander the Great, Hannibal or Napolean to the Spaniards defeating the overwhelmingly more numerous Incas. Here are some examples that I have seen deployed to mislead a competitor – what would you add? Creating a ‘smokescreen’ of patent filings covering technology of lesser commercial interest to make it difficult to ascertain the actual… Read More

Everyone has plans.  Those who excel at implementing ‘the plan’ are usually operating on old information. If you have up to date information and high quality analysis you can make your çompetitor’s plans irrelevant. Competitor actions, on the other hand, are not so easy to avoid. If you have the right process in place, then you have a fair chance of predicting their likely options and which they will choose.

Strategy without analysis is like turning up to play a sporting match when you don’t know what sport you’re playing, what equipment to bring, the rules, who your opponent is or indeed where to show up for the game. It’s not uncommon for far reaching errors to be made due to a simple lack of analysis.  The people involved may know what to do but never get that far because they didn’t… Read More

Whoever has the best information is most likely to succeed and on their own terms. It is difficult to overstate the importance of high quality information to the development and execution of world class IP Strategy. The best IP Strategists are keen practitioners of competitive intelligence and analyse a wide variety of  information. I use checklists of information sources tuned to different kinds of issues – some are free, some paid and… Read More

Einstein said: “life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” Similarly, with businesses and business strategy. A business that does not move forward will lose its balance between profiting from existing business enterprises and building (or acquiring) new enterprises for future growth. Consider Kodak, a US colossus recently in the news, that focused so heavily on its existing film business that it failed to effectively harness… Read More

For many years people have sought insight about innovation prowess and patent values from patent data.  This has led to the creation of a number of proprietary algorithms that use patent statistic to deliver this insight.  The sellers of these algorithms often require end-users to take on faith that the algorithms used are correct and have been scientifically examined for their correlation with the reported findings.  Thomson Scientific’s recent publication of the… Read More

If you encountered an alien from another world and wanted him to understand the concept of what a word is, chances are you would put words (and their object or idea representation) into context with the letters from which we write them and the sentences and paragraphs for which they are a part. This is the best way to describe any system – to put it into context with a system below… Read More

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