How does your company create an IP Culture? The answer is quite simple: push responsibility for IP outside of the R & D and in-house Legal “IP Expert” silos to those who work at all areas of your company. This requires significant educational efforts because, in most companies, personnel outside of R & D and Legal are not generally able to recognize whether their efforts relate to protectable intellectual property or trade secrets. As a result, they typically do their jobs without awareness that their innovations, if captured and protected, could provide your company with valuable proprietary advantage over competitors.
Under the existing paradigm at your company, your employee’s ignorance about the value of her innovations to the organization means that those responsible for capturing and maximizing corporate asset value never find out about her innovation. And, in my view, if an innovation is not identified as having value, this innovation, in fact, has no value and, as an unrecognized asset has no corporate value.
The key to building an IP Culture is to educate your employees who work outside of the “IP Expert” silos of R & D and Legal to recognize protectable innovations and to appropriately notify their managers of their innovations. In short, your employees need to be as much a part of the IP Strategy process as your designated corporate “IP experts”.
One way to establish an IP Culture is to have your in-house IP staff serve as “IP Ambassadors” who go out into the company and engage in workshops. This approach has been very effective at IP Strategy and IP Value Creation thought-leaders such as BellSouth (now AT & T), Kimberly Clark and Proctor & Gamble. However, the success of an IP Ambassador program at your company depends on whether your IP experts can tackle a corporate-wide educational effort along with their existing responsibilities.
Another way to work to creating an IP Culture is to engage a consultant such as myself to come in and work with your organization. (Yes, this is a blatant plug for my business.) Use of a consultant to assist you in establishing an IP Culture allows your IP Experts to attend to their day-to-day tasks of protecting the IP that your company has already identified as being valuable. Additionally, use of a consultant to help you create an IP Culture within your organization has the additional benefit of allowing your company to bring best practices in IP Strategy and management that exist outside of your organization.
Regardless of whether your company seeks assistance from The Hutter Group to assist you in developing an IP Culture in your organization, the reality is that you must do something in this regard to successfully create and maximize your IP Value. So, before your organization embarks on an expensive IP Strategy plan, make sure that you are not doomed to failure before you begin because you did not include in your plans development of an IP Culture.
