Posts Tagged: "business development"

In the IP field, and countless others, online or virtual meetings have become ingrained in professional life, an enabler of remote working in the age of COVID-19 and beyond. Conference platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Slack, and BlueJeans are now essential tools for collaboration within and between enterprises. It doesn’t matter if you’re a tech enthusiast, straggler, or somewhere in the middle. You’ve had to adopt the technology or be left behind. Although united as users, we don’t uniformly leverage the functionality available on conference platforms. Notably, some of us diverge in our use, or non-use, of webcams during online meetings.

As of December 2020, LinkedIn, Microsoft’s social networking service for professionals, has over 722 million total members in 200 countries and regions worldwide. Its growth seems unstoppable: the service continues to attract legions of newcomers to the workforce and more seasoned late adopters. Meanwhile, existing members are expanding their engagement, leveraging LinkedIn in new ways they hope will prove fruitful. Intellectual property professionals—defined broadly here as persons or entities whose professional work involves or relates to IP or IP practitioners—abound as members on LinkedIn. Law firm, corporate, and government attorneys and their colleagues. IP and legal service providers of all kinds, from litigation and prosecution support to software and IP monetization. Judges and law school professors. Legal associations, recruiters, and producers of IP conferences. The list goes on. Not surprisingly, corporate IP attorneys like myself are constantly typecast as LinkedIn buyers, viewed as a source of coveted business in a highly competitive field. For me, LinkedIn has become the single most active forum where sellers attempt to pitch me services. This has been both a blessing and a curse, an opportunity to be impressed—or not.

Patents, for a long while, have been an integral part of business development strategy. Companies like ARM and Qualcomm, for example, have built their business around patents which constitute a major part of their revenue. And the quality of their patents, for sure, is playing a key role in it.