Most companies are concerned with protecting their Intellectual Property, and I wouldn't argue that this is a good idea. However, I'm increasingly hearing the concern that companies are spending valuable resources protecting Intellectual Property that has little market value.
I recently met a patent attorney with a large corporation who described it this way. He said that it used to be the earning a patent was the engineering equivalent of winning an Oscar. Now, he equates earning patents to collecting baseball cards among the engineers in the company. The patent group is very busy, and they are looking for ways to ensure that the company invests in protecting ideas that have the highest commercial value to the company.
This is a great question, and one that has not been given the corporate consideration it deserves. The easy answer would be to require that people filing for patents provide a market assessment of the value of their idea. The problem with that is you risk missing an opportunity to protect ideas for raw technology that may not have commercial value on their own, but provide the building blocks for a multitude of commercially valuable ideas.
There is no easy answer, but the question needs to be asked much more often. I'm interested to hear how others are managing this issue.
I think that companies should explore licensing their patents far more aggressively. If you do not have the capability to develop all your ideas (and lets face it – you rarely do) then find someone who can and share the proceeds.
If companies are part of innovation ecosystems then the question is not How innovative am I? but rather: i. How innovative is my ecosystem? ii. How effective is my position in that ecosystem?
It sounds like the large corporation mentioned here is lacking both an IP strategy and the processes to support it. Allowing inventors to invent in a vacuum can be a risk to the company, but there must be a process breakdown that is allowing those inventions to become patents.
Inventions (and inventors!) should be guided by a comprehensive IP strategy that supports the goals of the business. For instance, an IP strategy should identify where new inventions are desired and what type of inventions are needed, e.g. lowering the cost of the sensor component in Device A or improving the longevity of Product B with new chemical compositions. If there is no strategy, you cannot expect inventors to know what inventions will be valuable to the company.
A solid review board process will evaluate inventions for how well they achieve the objectives of the IP strategy, including market applicability and long term potential. It is not reasonable to place that burden on inventors alone; instead a diverse team with varied perspectives (technical, business, marketing, and legal) is needed for this crucial decision-making.
@ Matt – I love the ecosystem concept. Do you have any examples of companies that are doing this successfully that you could share? I’m curious how they avoid conflict of interest issues.
@ Kate – Is it safe to assume that the IP strategy would also address the conditions that a completely new breakthrough would need to satisfy? Your point is interesting, as the IP strategies I have seen focus more on the process. In a sense, it would be more like the product development strategy, but the requirements would be less prescriptive of a solution. Great!