The market is filled with technological inventions and with more competition; the value of IP has been on the rise. This increased value substantiates the reason for having effective strategic IP management. Primarily, now going into the perspective of Strategic IP management, various key factors can be found which dictate the management. A few of them can be: firstly, the production of multiple products or the acquiring the product from the market. Secondly, value extraction holds an important part. Meaning thereby, how the firm exploits the product and garners profit from it. Lastly, another important perspective is the governance level or rather the people associated with the firm, which the author has mentioned previously as well. So conclusively, three factors are important when one deals in the domain of Strategizing IP.

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Strategic management and stakeholder participation

The first one deals with the value generation concept where the firm generates value through the development of different inventions or acquiring the same from the market. Various companies also acquire different IPs from the market for the sake of increasing their valuation. This is also a part of the Strategic IP management where the firm increases its capitalization through increasingly acquiring the technologies. The second one deals with value extraction where the firm extracts the value from the product or their invention. This forms another important point for the strategic purpose. The firm needs to have the utmost precision while dealing with its product and services. The products and services must extract the maximum potential from the IP to be successful. As the author previously described that if the firm or the company are not able to extract the potential, then it will be a loss for the organization. Similarly, the important part is to effectively extract the potential of the IP being put to the market. Hence, two sides of the same coin will be value extraction and value generation. The last factor that plays a major role is the firm’s members. While discussing the same, the author noted previously that the members must share similar objectives and goals for the strategic development of the business. Therefore for an effective strategy, it is important to have stronger participation of the members of the firm to provide overall results. These all factors are an important part of the strategic perspective. All such factors cumulatively, impact the competitiveness in the market, thereby providing a balanced approach between the acquisition and the exploitation of the assets.

Can open innovation help?

The traditional mindset of the industry has always been the conventional method of doing the innovation where the importance was of the secrecy for the invention. This secrecy is maintained throughout the process which prima facie gives us the overview of having close innovation. Open innovation is different from this. This perspective runs counter to the notion that the information is kept secret. This innovation is the alternative to the set of confinement that the company follows. Probably, there might be more literature available on open innovation, but the literature tries to define the aspect on an abstract which helps us to interpret the same very validly. The notion of open innovation was never a new aspect.

When we say that the company is relying on the expertise of their research, they primarily deal in closed innovation. The information and other know-how are kept secret preferably through the protection as the trade secret. That closed innovation achieves strategic importance if the company can build and manage its portfolio from internal inventions. The firm/company believes that the development of the company can also be brought by people outside the company helping its strategic growth. Undoubtedly, the more information and innovations are garnered, the more strategic relevance is for the company. For this strategy, it is imperative to understand that not all information can be shared since some constitutes to be relevant for the company’s internal evaluation. What is the aim of open innovation? After reading various literature and hearing few lectures, the author feels that this open innovation has a couple of aims to fulfil upon. Some primary aims are more visible to us on the face. Firstly, the main aim of increasing the bandwidth of R&D in the firm. This is the foremost aim for the open innovation that any company seeks to achieve. Secondly, open innovation is used for marketing purposes. The company tends to use openness for its marketing as well. The firm increases its reach through open innovation to the experts and the public sharing the details of their products. Thirdly, the firm uses this open innovation to gain information about the market and customers. Through this, the firm seeks inputs from various stakeholders which eventually provide insights regarding the market and customer. There might be a couple of more aims of open innovation like this openness is also used for talent hunt or even in few cases, it might be used for creating the effective entry and exit barrier to the competition.

Author: Saransh Chaturvedi an associate at Global Patent Filing,  in case of any queries please contact/write back us at support@globalpatentfiling.com.