Think IP Education


Our expertise involves training on universal principles of strategy to address specific opportunities and threats associated with IP:

• Strategy – What to do to protect and leverage IP
• Planning – How to protect and leverage IP
• Process – Streamlining and driving out unnecessary risks

Our approach is holistic; we put IP into context with the business. Our approach is product solution driven; we recognize that for IP to realize value, it must offer ideas that customers will buy. Our approach simplifies without dumbing down IP; we focus on teaching excellence by ensuring our attendees master the fundamentals and build from there.

 

Why Consider Think IP for training?

The work of Think IP Strategy is grounded on the fundamentals of pure strategy. This is important to understand, because most IP strategy courses are actually about IP planning and IP processes. These are components of IP strategy that our courses do cover, but they are not IP strategy. Plans do not survive first contact with adversity in the IP profession any more than they do in warfare, and processes are only tools. An IP strategy is a discipline and a context from which smart people can intelligently make appropriate decisions for the changing conditions they face when moving from where they are now (A) to where they should like to be (B). It seeks to drive out uncertainty while at the same time compensating for that which cannot be known for sure.

We often begin our work with new clients with an IP Strategy course that puts everyone on the same page and using the same language of strategy moving forward. Alternatively, an IP Strategy course may be a follow on to a first project after we have addressed an immediate threat or opportunity in order to further leverage the results of the project. As a relatively small consulting company, this also helps us to extend the level of support we can offer for your given budget long-term, since it helps us to help you help yourself become a highly proficient IP strategy force.

 

Core Courses

Senior Executive top line briefing on IP Strategy

How to use IP to shape your markets alongside your other business tools.

This course focuses on how to use the rights to enforce exclusivity offered by IP to shape markets through useful interaction and blocking of competitors, partners, and customers.  It puts IP into context with other tools for shaping markets more commonly taught at business schools such as the use of capital, distribution, and sales.  IP is a powerful tool for shaping markets that many executives leave on the table.  Exceptional business leaders including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have proven an exception.  Protecting IP is one thing.  Do you really know how to use it well?

 

12 Ways to Improve Your IP Strategy

Course to help IP savvy companies take their IP strategy planning a level further based upon the book Outpacing the Competition. The course includes 12 distinct ways to improve an IP strategy that can be used in whole or in part inside current IP programs.

 

IP Operations Management

Course that develops the fundamentals tenets of a successful IP function inclusive of focus, economizing resources, freedom of operation, and risk management. It includes tailored discussions on IP generation, IP harvesting, filing, prosecution, enforcement, defense, outsourcing, cross-department interaction, licensing, and communications. These are all the elements by which an organization can enact IP strategy.

 

IP Protection and Exploitation Strategies for Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, and Chemical Companies

Course that shows how companies can gain and retain the most value from their IP worldwide by securing and leveraging the rights to enforce exclusivity respective jurisdictions grant. This course is based upon the book Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Chemical Inventions:
World Protection and Exploitation.

 

Defense of the Mieza HChip and Defense of the Mieza Compound

These courses are based on our popular books of the same titles.  It is oriented toward new initiatives (whether in early stage or established companies) that teaches sixteen major lessons about how to build a holistic IP strategy to win markets by illustrating in real time the major pitfalls that can trip up even the best intentioned heads of IP.

 

IP War Games

Sometimes the best way to learn IP strategy is to put it into practice to address real world problems and opportunities. War games do just that. An IP War Game is a facilitated exercise designed to challenge planning assumptions by putting plans to the test against competitor team members before they face real world competitors. IP War Games at Think IP Strategy trace their roots to military Red Team exercises. They embrace the greater complexity of business where competitors are often also partners and customers at the same time.

 

Innovation Workshops

A focus of Think IP Strategy is to help companies shape the future of their markets by inventing it. An innovation workshop facilitated by Think IP Strategy can be used to accelerate innovation on a given product solution line, and for new technologies uncover potential applications in order to create an R&D path of necessary enablers and an overall IP protection strategy.

 

Competitive IP

How to Profile Your Competitors

This course focuses on how to categorize types of competition that can be studied through IP and the types of intelligence that IP analysis can and cannot reveal.  A point of emphasis will be how to ask for analysis reports that provide the data and intelligence that you need for given objectives – state of the art, white space, freedom of operation, M&A, licensing, and more.  Anyone can collect tables and charts of patents.  Does your data tell you the story you need to hear?

 

IP Plans

How to structure and communicate the way you will handle IP challenges.

This course presents a comprehensive structure for ensuring that you have covered all the elements needed to draft a comprehensive IP plan.  The structure is presented as an overlay to supplement existing planning structures and to fill in any gaps within those structures.  IP planning success depends upon understanding where plans need to be firm and where flexibility is essential to handle real world challenges.  Most IP plans will not survive first contact with adversity.  Will yours?

 

IP Strategy

Determining what you will do to anticipate and handle IP challenges.

This course focuses on the core principles of IP strategy and its alignment with business and legal strategy.  It centers on setting a direction from (A) to (B) that makes sense for the enterprise and successively mitigating or eliminating the uncertainties that otherwise lower the chances of success.  IP strategy has inherent complexities that can be understood within proven principles of sound strategy.  Does your IP strategy align with those principles?

 

Product-focused IP Strategy

How to establish a comprehensive and integrated IP portfolio for developing, making, advancing and defending product solutions sold to customers. 

This course focuses on aligning the IP strategy to the salient benefits of product-solutions that make a difference at the point of sale and therefore drive revenue.  Most IP covers inventions and ideas needed just to be in the market.  Have you defined and protected the critical IP that will give value and meaning to the rest?

 

Reducing Your IP Risks

How to limit your IP exposure to uncertainty and unnecessary risk and favorably change the balance of risk with respect to competitors, partners or customers. 

This course focuses on securing freedom of operation, building IP portfolios that are worth more to the business than just the sum of their parts, and leveraging other aspects of the business alongside IP that can improve the risk profile.  How secure will your competitors find your IP position to be?

 

Increase the Value of Your IP

How to leverage IP rights and IP transactions to enhance your return on investment in your IP assets. 

This course focuses on direct and indirect ways to profit from your IP as both a saleable asset and a tool to shape markets.  IP use and transactions, like all other business matters, tend to have strong emotional drivers that people justify with logic afterward.  Understanding how emotion and logic play into the solutions and ideas that your IP protects will allow you to raise the priority of your IP to those who can pay for it.  Most IP covers solutions that people have thus far lived without.  Have you found a way to make access to your IP essential?

 

Manage Your IP at World’s Best Practice Level

How to have the right IP portfolio at the right time covering the right authorities and for the right cost and return on investment. 

This course focuses on IP strategy prioritization, resource economization, freedom of operation, risk management, operational tempo, and complexity reduction as it pertains to managing a world class IP portfolio.  IP operations are inherently complex given the number of laws, regulations, authorities, accounting conventions, and the underlying IP itself.  Universal tenets of strategic operations can give decision-makers a guiding direction to determine whether given individual decisions make strategic sense in context with the larger picture.  How do you know that an IP decision you make today will be the right one when it matters years from now?

 

Enforce Your IP

How to use your rights to enforce exclusivity to achieve desirable business outcomes that might otherwise not have occurred. 

This course focuses on using IP to shape markets through business-oriented IP enforcement strategies.  It examines the complex relationships that can exist between enterprises that may be competitors, partners, and customers even at the same time, emphasizing how to achieve the desired effect of IP enforcement outside the courtroom and how to win when the courtroom is your best option.  Have you chosen your best option for achieving the benefit you would like your IP to deliver at minimal risk and cost?

 

Develop Your IP Portfolio

How to secure and employ IP from any source to advance and defend your enterprise. 

This course focuses on building an IP portfolio under the philosophy that all the IP in the world, including that held be competitors, partners, and customers, is potentially IP that your enterprise could use to advance your business given the right strategy.  It also delves into IP creation, selection, and documentation strategies that raise the chances of securing meaningful IP without inhibiting the potential to profit from the unexpected creations that R&D efforts may produce.  How well are you shaping the future of your industry?

 

Investigate Your Opportunities and Threats

How to build the capacity to make fully informed IP decisions. 

This course focuses on handling ten types of competition that arise within complex markets where people and enterprises are routinely competitors, partners, and customers at the same time.  To succeed in complex IP environments you need to be able to gauge when cooperation or competition makes the most sense for a situation irrespective of who the participating entities are.  You also need to fully appreciate how your relevant IP of today may become irrelevant tomorrow so that you can drive the pace of the transition.  How well have you set yourself to compete on your terms in highly contested markets?

 

Pursue Excellence in Your IP Strategy

How to outpace your competition through rapid and proficient decision-making in IP.

This course focuses on developing five tiers of IP strategy performance from which to build an IP strategy framework and a continuous improvement process.  The topline goal is to make better IP decisions faster as a necessary precursor to holding the initiative and succeeding on your terms.  A good strategy sets a direction and affords the flexibilities needed to stay at least one step ahead of your competitors.  What have you done today to reach your destinations better, faster, or for less total cost than you were set to do yesterday?