innovation - Securing Innovation

BusinessWeek Video: Abbott Laboratories

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:46:48 -0500

BusinessWeek has an online feed of interesting videos of innovative companies, including this clip in which Abbott Laboratories CEO Miles White discusses a new drug-coated stent technology that lowers a patient's risk of arteries becoming reclogged. Full disclosure: Abbott Laboratories is a client of IP.com.

Road to Success in Tough Economic Times

tpetrocelli@ip.com (Tom Petrocelli) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:02:35 -0500

There is little doubt that we are looking at some tough times economically. No matter what the two candidates for the American Presidency will or can do, we will be in the midst of an economic downturn. The chief reason for this is that consumers can't buy a lot of goods. Credit is tight, jobs are being shed, and most importantly, people are frightened about the future. This doesn't mean that consumers won't buy any goods. It does mean they will be much more selective about what they will spend limited amounts of money on.

A typical business reaction to a downturn is to cut, cut, cut. While cutting the fat away is good, cutting into innovation is the beginning of the death spiral. Businesses are no longer competing amongst similar businesses to sell similar products to consumers. They are competing against all other purchases. This is the time to actually invest in innovation, to invest in creating compelling goods that people will buy instead of something else.

"Compelling" is the key word here. If consumers don't feel drawn to new products they will make buying decisions based on price or someone else's compelling product. This is why innovation management is more important now than ever. Coming up with good ideas is hard enough. Knowing that they exist, where they exist, and making decisions about them is even harder. Companies abound with good ideas. Most are just buried somewhere so that product and brand managers can't find them.

This is one of the key reasons that InnovationQ exists. By helping scientists and engineers to collect, organize, and share ideas, InnovationQ allows for greater creative output. Even better, by allowing others to find these ideas and make decisions about them, good ideas percolate up to the where they can become useful product features.

At any point in time, product innovation is important. In a down economic climate, where differentiation and value become the guiding lights for consumers, it is even more essential. InnovationQ can help drive innovation and better products.

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Watch For IP Leaks From Publications

tpetrocelli@ip.com (Tom Petrocelli) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:32:55 -0500

Over the years I've written dozens of technical articles, blogs, and marketing literature. Most of what I wrote was reviewed by marketing, engineering, and perhaps sales. My articles have been examined for their ability to carry the corporate message, technical accuracy, and how the pieces positioned products. No one ever brought up the issue of intellectual property. This is not something unique to my experience. Companies worry about the content and form of publications but not the IP that might be revealed in them. When someone does catch some important IP heading out the door it is often by happenstance. It's not so much that companies don't care.

If you bring up the subject of "IP in publications" most companies will sincerely tell you that they are worried about it. Yet despite that, examining publications for IP is not always part of the normal publication review process. On the flip side are the companies that are paranoid about IP in publications. For many, the knee jerk reaction is "publish nothing!" This doesn't work for long since publications are a major part of corporate communications. Are you going to tell scientists that they can't publish a scientific paper? They won't work for you. Just try and shut up an engineer with a good idea for an article. You'll only infuriate him. Marketing has to publish white papers and sales literature so you can't stop them from producing publications.

The simple solution is a publication clearance process, implemented as a workflow. The process of Publication Clearance pushes the document in front of everyone who should see it including legal counsel, patent counsel, technical and marketing. Publication clearance within InnovationQ also protects the document as intellectual property. It is subjected to the same LegalSafeguarding process as documents in the Trade Secret Management modules. We can even build hooks into docketing or our Trade Secret Management modules to help better identify IP contained in publications before it is too late.

Adopting a publication clearance process is a good first step toward protecting important intellectual property. Having tools to automate this process makes it much easier to live with.