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There’s a lot of lip service given these days to ‘aligning IP with business goals’. Most times there’s no indication at all about how to do that or any of the practicalities. One practical matter that comes up time and again is around the goals themselves. Specific goals allow more room for compromise or pivots in the approach used to obtain what really matters. Putting it another way, an indirect strategy… Read More
IP itself has a lifecycle decoupled from the associated product solutions itself. A patented invention may apply to several product solutions which may be at different phases of their lifecycle. A brand may have a lifecycle that will live through many generations of patented products as an enterprise’s capacity to make product solutions appealing to customers changes over time. Managing these different lifecycles is where part of the art of IP strategy… Read More
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… Read More
A basic strategic principle, using deceptive plots to distract the other party and wisely choosing the time to bring something forth in order to preserve the element of surprise, can be applied with success in military, sports, business and most other competitive environments. An example of the principle’s application in business appears in the approach Apple adopts for the development and release of its products. The recent release of iPhone 4S brought… Read More
It’s the end of the first Batman movie from 1989 and Batman is fighting his nemesis, the Joker. Batman says, “I’m going to kill you!” The Joker says, “You IDIOT! You made me.” So it plays out in real life too. We make our own competition. From whom do you think the low cost airlines bought their used airplanes? Wasn’t Kodak a pioneer of digital photography? From where do the generic drug… Read More
What is an ideal strategy and would you know one if it bit you? Why bother with it anyway? The ideal strategy is a strategy that provides 100% of the desired benefit and 0% drawback. It is a theoretical target given the mathematical reality that 1/0 (where whole benefit = 1, and no drawback = 0) does not exist – all strategies have drawbacks. A key question to ask, when planning IP… Read More
In some situations, filing IP very early in the invention cycle can actually do harm and perhaps kill the potential commercial prospects for an invention. Earlier blogs in this series have highlighted speed of action as a way to achieve competitive advantage. Speed to file IP, speed to publish, speed to invent. But to quote a well-known public vehicle information commercial “speed kills”. Put another way, the early bird can arrive too… Read More
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