Posts Tagged: "Business Strategy"

As a patent practitioner and corporate strategist speaking at IPWatchdog’s Patent Prosecution & Portfolio Management Masters program next week, on a panel titled “Strategic Portfolio Acquisition and Maintenance; Ensuring Business Objectives Align with Patent Strategy,” I decided to gather some resources that help organize potential business objectives and questions that can be answered so that patent strategy, portfolio maintenance, and portfolio acquisition are able to be aligned with a business strategy. Patent strategy is only a part of an overall intellectual property strategy. The intellectual property strategy should be part of a business strategy – although it often is not.

“Need to know” is a bedrock tenet of information security. You only get to see it if you need to see it. The reasoning is that the fewer people who know the details, the lower the risk that information will be compromised by reaching the competition. Another term used among professionals is the “principle of least privilege,” borrowed from the notion in computer science that a user account should be given only that level of privilege that is absolutely necessary to its operation within the system, making failures less likely. By whatever name, the principle increases control by limiting access. The idea that any one person in an organization probably doesn’t need to know much is rooted in the industrial revolution. When we moved from the age of craftsmen who made an entire product to the assembly line, the worker mounting the wheel didn’t have to know anything about the rest of the car…. Keeping secrets has long been viewed through the same lens: compartmentalization helps keep things under control. But interestingly, it doesn’t always make things more efficient or productive.

Managing international trademark portfolios in the age of globalization can be a fickle endeavor.  Ecommerce has blown the top off traditional thinking as it relates not only to advising your clients on what and where to file, but also how to strategically maintain those filings in the face of an increasingly crowded and adversarial global marketplace.  When a brand attempts to gain a foothold with an emerging clientele, fortune tends to favor the strategically bold.  For this reason, companies are often trying to establish their IP rights in countries where actual use or implementation may not be in the cards for years.  In the case of trademarks, the benefits are obvious: if/when a product is launched, a service begins, or a brand is introduced, a strong and enforceable portfolio is waiting to greet and protect it.  However, in jurisdictions around the world, such a strategy leaves open the possibility of an attack on these rights, most commonly in the form of a non-use cancellation action. 

We must communicate effectively to be helpful. If the client isn’t listening because our delivery is ineffective or off-putting, it doesn’t matter that our legal opinion was brilliant because they will not be listening. Every interaction counts. Here are 13 tips to improve client communications.

Instead of following the same IP plan year after year, IP managers should focus their strategy on aligning their IP with their business, including developing a more concise IP plan, and switch to using smarter and modern analytics… IP managers must: (1) Start with the end in mind: IP is the business; (2) Build a plan, measure and manage and continuous improvement; and (3) Create an environment where your IP and business execs have access to timely actionable intelligence to support their decisions and strategies.

Transfer pricing refers to the prices charged for goods, services, and intellectual property (IP) between or among legal entities of a corporation, including a parent company and its domestic and foreign subsidiaries and other controlled entities (each entity a “Taxpayer”)… Many transfer pricing analyses are nuanced in nature, relying upon datasets, models, computations, comparisons, assumptions, and interpretations. When controlled entities are domiciled in respective different jurisdictions, multiple transfer pricing systems may apply. Transfer pricing determinations may substantially impact Taxpayers’ tax burden and profitability. In other words, though challenging to perform, transfer pricing analyses offer opportunities to obtain more favorable tax treatment.

Do you feel fatigued by the long hours, demanding clients and little sleep?   At points in our careers, many lawyers feel like they don’t have a life and that their work defines them.   This is understandable given the demands of the job and the high fees clients pay for legal services.   Yet, you must find ways to recharge and maintain your momentum for the work… Successful people stay focused and attack the challenge at hand, while enjoying family, friends and their surroundings. This is difficult to achieve if you are too tired and bored with your job. You can develop ways to supercharge your career and make certain that you are on the path to continued success and happiness for the long-term.

Giving a lawyer a critique of their work can be difficult. Yet, you cannot improve lawyer performance or achieve quality work product goals without providing feedback. In this article, I will share with you some of the things that I have learned about giving effective feedback in my years of managing lawyers with staff sizes ranging from 10 to over 2,000.

“It’s not very helpful to talk about quality,” said former Chief Judge Michel. We agree. Quality has too many meanings for too many people. We all want quality patents, but we do not agree on what quality means. A better objective for patent strategy and patent management is the pursuit of valuable patents. “But wait!” you say, “Isn’t ‘valuable’ just…

While many, if not most, enterprises have instituted, and are executing, an IP strategy of some sort, an important question should be considered: Is the IP strategy optimal, such that its execution extracts maximum value from company technology? Some corporate IP strategies may seem sound in theory, but in practice they are (a) selectively or inconsistently applied within or across projects, (b) incompatible with how teams actually work, (c) relatively narrow in how they perceive innovation, and (d) distracting to innovators and IP practitioners while consuming enormous resources. Ultimately, the return on IP investment of such strategies may be questionable. However, enterprises that periodically take a step back to reflect on their current IP strategies, and recalibrate them if appropriate, are likely to derive the greatest possible value from IP.

CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and General Counsel are typically very good at making decisions when they have the relevant information, but how often do they have the relevant information when making decisions regarding patents and innovation? Even worse, when decisions are being made the Chief Patent Counsel is frequently not even in the room.

Today’s pace of innovation and competitive intensity demand greater protection of new ideas and inventions. Yet intellectual property (IP) management is not a high business priority for many companies. Organizations that fail to recognize IP as a strategic asset put their competitive advantage and profit margins at risk. Companies can circumvent these potentially adverse impacts by maximizing the value of their creativity. Prioritizing and protecting IP assets helps organizations stay in front of competitors and drive greater growth.