Posts Tagged: "Intangible Investor"

Students at prestigious universities in the United States are not required to take even a single intellectual property (IP) course to fulfill the requirements for a graduate business degree. Course offerings in 2021 remain elective at all of the elite management programs, and the coverage varies by school, department offering them and the background of the instructor. These and other findings about IP education at business schools are contained in a report compiled by the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding (CIPU) that will be announced on Thursday at the 4th Intellectual Property Awareness Summit. The report, “Intellectual Property at Business Schools: An Evolving Landscape,” looks at the state of IP education at the top 20 U.S. programs, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, and comes away with decidedly mixed findings. While some 44 courses are offered by the leading programs, almost one-third offer a single elective course, and none are compulsory. This is particularly pertinent on World IP Day, the theme of which this year focuses on the importance of IP rights for small and medium businesses, and the problems that a lack of IP understanding can lead to.

The movements of IP-centric business have never been easy to appreciate. With technology patent and licensing values slowly returning to higher levels, it is a good time to revisit a business model which has been a lightning rod for criticism: the public intellectual property company or PIPCO. PIPCO is a term coined by this Intangible Investor columnist in 2013, when there were 30 or more publicly held patent licensing companies with a collective market capitalization of about $9 billion. That may sound like a lot to some, but when you look at the largest patent licensing company, Qualcomm, whose market cap is currently $136 billion, you realize almost everyone else in this group is or was relatively small, typically a micro-cap, with a market value under $1 billion. These companies’ lack of size, unpredictable quarterly revenue and attractive but unpredictable assets positioned them below the radar of most institutional investors. When it comes to weathering financial storms, like ocean-going vessels, sizes matters.