Finding Value in Innovation

From high-tech to lowest-of-tech, companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to satisfy that pressure to find additional value, and now they are looking to innovation. Many are forming intellectual property (IP) commercialization programs in response. Typically, this means either licensing/assigning their IP assets or asserting them against another company. Assertion has recently become a tool of choice for many organizations. But, again, we often see that interest in value extraction exceeds our skill to effectively realize it. As we react, the pendulum swings too far in one direction—both in terms of exceeding companies’ ability to execute with appropriate skills and resources and even often beyond what is in its best interests. The “new” interest in realizing innovation value often takes the form of a single-minded focus on exploiting the near term and “free” money from assertion and licensing. Companies can unknowingly exhaust their innovation assets in this type of feverish short-term exploitation, or worse, see those precious assets naively squandered. This can leave companies without the “found” revenue they are counting on in the future, but more importantly leave them without the necessary innovation assets to support their current or future core business.

As in many reactive situations, the sense of long-term balance between opposing forces can be skewed by near-term pressure. The forces out of balance here are familiar to ...

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