Global strategy guru Pankaj Ghemawat is dead against the idea that we live in a globalised world. See his recent blog post and interview on Harvard‘s Ideacast.
So does that mean that we should stop thinking about IP Strategy globally?
No.
As Ghemawat points out, the trend might be towards globalisation, but we’re a long way from it. One of his keypoints is that people tend to overestimate the extent to which the world is globalised today. He calls it ‘globaloney’.
Intellectual property strategy has withstood the worst of the ‘globalisation’ problems for the simple reason that the local law is different in each country (sometimes only subtley) – even within economic regions, such as the EU.
While the push towards harmonisation of intellectual property law continues around the world (notice for example ‘first to file’ for US patents came one step closer late last week), it seems quite incredible looking forward from today that there would ever be complete harmonisation of IP law across the world. A taste of the difficulties inherent in such an approach can be seen in Europe with the European Patent Litigation Agreement.
So, even if the world were to become ‘globalised’, there’s a pretty strong chance that intellectual property strategy, at least, would need to be executed in a jurisdiction by jurisdiction approach.
However, a global, coordinated strategy is still incredibly important to ensure consistency (eg. of arguments put in litigation, or approaches to parallel importers) and effectiveness (eg. minimising duplication, maximising results across countries, etc).
Do you think Pankaj is right? How do you think this impacts on IP Strategy?