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Intellectual Property Management-Protect or Lose


To protect ideas, expressions, and other intellectual capital, organizations have to manage their IP, because until protected, ideas and expressions are the property of no one. The speed and comprehensibility with which an organization moves to protect a good idea sometimes can be critical. This is true now more than ever with the Internet's super highway enabling ideas to travel at high speeds.


With competitive intelligence and monitoring of market trends, the same idea may be developed almost simultaneously by two or more organizations. The only organization that can maximize its capitalization of the idea is the one that has adequately protected it. But not all ideas can be protected by patents, as many will not satisfy the stringent patent requirements. Still, a trademark or other form of IP can protect most ideas. That is where IP management helps an organization decide on the suitable protection to set up legal traps around its competitive territory.


Developing IP management as a core competency involves much more than securing the right legal protection. It involves adopting the suitable IP strategy for competitive positioning, and exploitation of the IP rights in integrated markets. IBM is a company that developed IP management as a core competency. IBM first adopted a very aggressive patenting strategy, where inventions are patented regardless of whether they fall in a core technological area or not. To enable this strategy, IBM made licensing of noncore as well as core technologies its business. Patenting widely, IBM innovated a system of licensing in which reverse engineering is used to detect infringements of its patents and subsequently seeking licensees. In a decade, IBM raised its licensing revenue from $90 million to $1.5 billion.


Organizational Culture-The Main Enabler

 

The previously mentioned competencies cannot be developed without the support of the right organizational culture. Many surveys and reports have shown how the best knowledge, innovation, and IP management programs fail because of an adverse organizational culture. Organizational culture is the set of shared unspoken values that stem from the organizational philosophy and history, and affect its behavioral patterns. It implicitly defines and affects the way business is done and the attitude of management and other employees. It was discovered that whenever an organization's culture is contrary to the values presented by a new initiative or program, the latter fails, sometimes even before it is fully launched.


For example, a culture that is permeated by top management's apathy toward employees' new ideas defeats all attempts to push innovation down in the organization, despite the best efforts of top management to communicate that they had a change of heart. No matter how many speeches top management gives to communicate their change of heart, entrenched organizational culture infuses a contrary message that defeats the initiative. If that culture conveys the message that to come up with new ideas is to be "a troublemaker," then no attempt by top management to champion this behavior will work unless clear steps are taken to change the culture. The impact of culture is so strong because it is rooted in an organization's "subconscious".


Culture is like the physical body's defense system, which is activated whenever a foreign object enters the body. The body fires out its fiercest antibodies to destroy the object, with some bodies being more sensitive than others. This is done without any control from the conscious mind. The same can be said of organizational behavior. Prior to introducing any change that is contrary to the existing culture, management needs to assess the existing and desirable cultures. In Chapter 10, ways in which management can assess and change its organizational culture are explored, among other changes that an organization has to undertake before embarking on implementing an ICM program.


Being deeply entrenched in the organization, a positive culture and philosophy is a core competency that can hardly be replicated by the competition. Culture also enables the development of knowledge, innovation, and IP management as core competencies. Every organization needs to develop culture as a core competency, but the same is not true for the other mentioned competencies. The reason is that each of these competencies predominantly relates to the management of a particular form of IC (knowledge resources, innovation processes, or IP), which is not necessarily the main driver of value in a particular industry. For example, the crucial importance of managing patents for technologically intensive industries, or managing brands for consumer products companies, is not matched in the service industry where knowledge management is king.


That being said, each organization will still need to develop all of the ICM stages (for the management of knowledge, innovation and IP) to leverage its IC to the maximum. The ability to determine the level to which each of the stages should be developed, and the coordination between the stages, is an organizational competency in its own right.