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.