Intellectual Property Dimension Part One: IPR actions needs to be carefully planned during the innovation process. The first dimension is that one needs to aggressively pursue IP (trademark, copyright, patents etc.) during the innovation stage.
History is littered with examples where ideator was worshipped but ‘others’ reaped the benefit. Xerox is the ‘market leader’ in this space! They innovated the 1st GUI technology, the 1st copier machine, the 1st desktop fax machine and the 1st computer networking – Ethernet, but did not bother to monetize on the IP and lost. Nowadays the world is full of thieves!
They did not even spare this poor blogger… Last month my blog was copied by an innovation consultant. Yes Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I was forced to act as the blog was featured in Rediff. I wrote to Rediff and they promptly removed the blog and apologized. Now my blog is protected by copyscape so that I get notified if anyone tries to steal the content.
Dell is a great example on how to leverage ‘business method patenting’. Though we all attribute Dell’s success to their sales skills and direct to order system, many fail to notice why IBM and HP is not to able to simply copy the well documented Dell ‘best practice’ – they cant because Dell has got 30 plus patents protecting their online direct model system.
Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created the worlds first spreadsheet VisiCalc but did not bother to patent and we all know what happened next ☺ Those who are nostalgic about spreadsheet history can checkout www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm where they indirectly lament “We retained a patent attorney who met with executives. The patent attorney explained to us the difficulty of obtaining a patent on software, and estimated a 10% chance of success, even using various techniques for hiding the fact that it was really software (such as proposing it as a machine). Given such advice, and the costs involved, we decided not to pursue a patent.”
Think about this...Last year MS Office clocked sales of $18.3 billion and out of Microsoft’s profit of $20.8 billion, $11.9 billion came from MS office.Though they are nice guys guess what will happen if Dan and Bob bump into their IP lawyer today? Bloodbath possibly ☺
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