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

IP and Business Strategy Must Be Congruent

To borrow a popular phrase, “It’s the corporate culture, stupid.” The internal milieu of a company can determine its innovative spirit, encouraging or depressing idea generation. The CEO of the enduring tech company, therefore, will nurture a totality of employee traits, characteristics, and attitudes directed toward the same strategic goal.

Instilling a coherent innovation culture requires that you examine whether all the projects percolating in your IP portfolio are congruent with your core business strategy. This may sound obvious, but many CEOs today either assume their IP portfolio and long-term strategy operate in sync or haven’t stopped to analyze the fit. Management tends to assess the value of IP projects individually instead of in the aggregate as it relates to the long-term interest of their business.

Abraham Maslow, the prominent American psychologist, developed the famous “Hierarchy of Needs” (see Exhibit 1.1), which presents a range of human physical and psychological needs. As humans grow and gain life experience, their position on the pyramid moves upward, with very few ever reaching self-actualization, or their full potential. Just as with Maslow’s famous version of the human order of intangible desires, corporate leaders possess their own hierarchy of essential drives, referred to as the “IP Management Hierarchy of Needs” (see Exhibit 1.2).

Exhibit 1.1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Exhibit 1.2. IP Management Hierarchy ...