Innovate or Perish: Managing the Enduring Technology Company in the Global Market

Restructuring Financial Incentives

Another fundamental change inherent in cross-disciplinary IP management is the adoption of incentives that aid in breaking down silos. As Karl Jorda asserts in Chapter 3, delineating the fusion model of IP management, “Innovation is everyone’s job.”

Ron Sansone, former Vice President of Strategic Innovation at Pitney Bowes, conducted an analysis showing that the number of inventors on a patent directly correlated to the significance of a patent. In that sense, the individual inventor was found to be the ultimate silo.

Since conditions for strategic IP management require different mental styles, companies must tailor different work incentives for everyone all the way down the research, development, and engineering (RD&E) “production line.” That includes any employee with a potentially profitable creative spark.

The incentive matrix of an enduring tech company may someday require royalty sharing between inventors and engineers, cross-divisional collaboration to leverage existing technology, and design of new technology or products with other companies’ technology.

As evidence of this, an intriguing analysis of new product innovations by Donald Lehman, Jacob Goldenberg, and David Mazursky revealed that the highest success-to-failure rate (13/1) was an idea that took advantage of a random event. By random, they meant a “Eureka” moment in which inventors stumbled on something they were not looking for but immediately recognized its significance. The ...