Most capital allocation fights aren’t really about the numbers. They’re about the absence of an organizing principle. When a business has no clear answer to “what are we actually about,” every investment decision collapses into a contest between competing logics — the safe, modelable bet against the early, ambiguous one.
That tension sits at the heart of a recent Harvard Business Review piece by Rita McGrath, The Power of Strategic Centering, which argues that in an economy where roughly 90% of corporate value now lives in intangible assets, the old anchors of defensible positions and durable physical assets no longer hold. Her central example is instructive: Novartis chose to center on innovative medicines, and a radioligand cancer therapy that looked like a gamble on a spreadsheet became an obvious move. The conglomerate was worth ~$190–200bn; the focused parts are now worth roughly twice that.
The lesson for IP-intensive organisations is that coherence, not breadth, is what compounds value — and intellectual property is where that coherence either becomes real or stays theoretical. (Read the article)
For in-house IP leads and GCs, here is the durable takeaway: your patent portfolio, trade secrets and brands are the operational expression of your company’s chosen centre — or evidence that it doesn’t have one. A business centred on a mission should be building IP around the problem, not a single technology, so its filings survive the next platform shift. A technology-centred company (think Fujifilm following its chemistry into cosmetics and medical imaging) should hold its capabilities as transferable assets and protect them accordingly, not lock them to a dying market.
The practical test is simple: pull your portfolio and ask whether each asset advances the centre or merely accumulated out of habit. Assets that no longer serve the strategy are cost and clutter; the gaps where the centre is exposed are your real risk. Aligning IP strategy with business goals isn’t a compliance exercise — it’s how you make the painkiller-versus-radioligand argument disappear before it starts. If you’re weighing a portfolio against a strategy that may have quietly drifted, that’s exactly the conversation worth having now, deliberately, rather than discovering the mismatch mid-transaction.