We have discussed the importance of intellectual property and the questions that Boards of Directors should ask about their company’s IP. These questions are really an “as is” assessment. What are we spending on R&D—actual and relative to competitors? Are we harvesting the output of R&D and turning it into intellectual property to benefit the stakeholders of the company? These questions are just the beginning.
Categories: IP Research, Boards of Directors, Time Horizons
All too often, companies face disruptive innovation from their competitors. And all too often, they combat the problem by simply copying the new technology. Whether they roll out a similar product or service, or they throw money behind developing their own version, these companies will spend the majority of their existence simply chasing others.
Categories: Innovation, IP Research
Whether you take a proactive approach or not, intellectual property is a big part of your corporate strategy. Your choice to take a proactive approach can help you drive revenue and growth—or you can spend your time following your competitors and fighting off litigation. In other words, you can create a sustainable competitive advantage, or you can find contentment being second best (at the very best) while giving up your market share.
Categories: Patent Strategy, IP Research
Remember some of the biggest companies of the last thirty years? We bet you had a Nintendo game system, complete with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt games. You probably went to Blockbuster on Friday nights. You probably had a Blackberry phone and marveled at the ability to simply check your email by phone. All these things were so amazing that they couldn’t possibly be improved upon, right?
Categories: IP Innovation, IP Research
The first article in this series discussed the reasons for increased activity in Patent Portfolio Trafficking, i.e. patent portfolios offered for sale or license. The second article described how companies with Small Volumes of portfolios to evaluate were able to streamline their patent evaluation processes from weeks to days using a Metric Driven Approach. This article looks at companies that have more fully integrated patent analytics into their patent portfolio acquisition process.
The Lemelson-MIT Awards Committee announced that the 2013 Winner of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize is Angela Belcher, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy in Materials Science and Biological Engineering at M.I.T. and a faculty member at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.
According to The Lemelson-MIT Program the Prize "recognizes individuals who translate their ideas into inventions and innovations that improve the world in which we live....Dubbed the "Oscar for Inventors," the Lemelson-MIT Prize is awarded to outstanding mid-career inventors who have developed a patented product or process of significant value to society, which has been adopted for practical use, or has a high probability of being adopted."
The focus of Prof. Belcher’s research is understanding and using the process by which nature makes materials in order to design novel hybrid organic-inorganic electronic and magnetic materials on new length scales. She then uses these materials in applications as varied as solar cells, batteries, medical diagnostics and basic single molecule interactions related to disease. Her research is highly interdisciplinary and brings together the fields of inorganic chemistry, materials chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology and electrical engineering.
