The Legal Blog

Development of an innovation strategy builds an intellectual property “fence” for your company.

This fence draws a boundary around the intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, publications) of your company. The ultimate formation of the fence (e.g., memorialization of the innovation) may take many forms including:

• Offensive intellectual property positions
  • attracts investors and partners, maintains a competitive advantage by protecting core business technology, and creates exit options
• Defensive intellectual property positions
  • provides a defense from competition, blocks alternative technologies, and builds value through incremental improvements to core technology
• Documented trade secrets
  • business information which is most valuable if not generally known
• Defensive, or strategic, publications
  • proactively publishing a technical disclosure when the costs of obtaining a patent outweigh the benefits of its exclusive rights 

A well-crafted innovation strategy protects major and future programs; as well as platform, or disruptive, technologies.

It establishes your company as a major competitive force.

An innovation strategy includes developing best practices for managing the innovation lifecycle and for memorializing the innovation in a form that creates maximum value.

Sometimes it’s good strategy to keep your developing innovation secret for a period of time.

Your strategy may include only publicizing your innovation after you have completed all evaluations (legal, business and management), experiments, development work, and finalized design concepts.  Only allow your competitors public knowledge of your advances and company direction when and how it suits your company most. You then remain one step ahead at all times.

Carefully manage your innovation and pursue appropriate protection in a timely and strategic manner.

Sometimes, internal and external forces disrupt innovation management and memorialization efforts. Budget issues, lack of time for employees to devote to innovation, lack of time and resources required to develop the innovation, shifting business priorities and competitive strategies, and changes in management support for innovation all impact innovation protection.  To counteract these forces,  savvy companies implement company-wide intellectual property education covering creation, strategy, protection and associated company processes.

By carefully managing and memorializing innovation, your company can:

• Protect its innovations without unintentionally losing or jeopardizing rights
• Quantify the impact of the resulting intellectual property by establishing key performance indicators
• Engage and incentivize company innovators
• Advance critical projects by providing actively managed and strategic intellectual property initiatives

These efforts validate the continued investment by the company in intellectual property and encourage the innovation process to repeat and advance.

Do you and/or your business need help with managing your innovation? We’re here for you. Contact us here.

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