MIT Sloan Management Review

The current balkanized approach to measuring patent quality is not serving the users of the world’s patent systems.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (left) and Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles (right) at advanced battery maker A123 Systems.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Office of Governor Patrick.

How your IP strategy might be killing your open innovation activities — and what you can do to make it an enabler, even a builder of industrial ‘ecosystems,’ instead.

How has Microsoft adapted to the era of open source? A new book, Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft, gives a detailed view into that question.

Image courtesy of Lawrence Lessig.

For the past decade, Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford Law School, has been best known as an iconoclastic, inventive voice for copyright reform.

Looking to spark innovation in your R&D workforce? Look for employees who are motivated by intellectual challenges — but not by job security.

The departure of talented employees can actually benefit a company, depending on where those individuals are hired. Therefore organizations must learn how to lose certain battles in order to win the war.

The concept of “co-opetition” — particularly collaboration with rivals involving jointly developing technologies — is inherently paradoxical.

U.S. patent law says that you can’t patent an invention that is “obvious.” However, in the 2007 case KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. et. al., the Supreme Court raised the standard for showing that an invention is not obvious and is therefore worthy of a patent.

At many companies, intellectual property has become an area of focus. Research shows that top-management involvement in IP strategy is associated with better IP performance.

Departing employees leave with more than what they know; they also take with them critical knowledge about who they know. That information needs to be a part of any knowledge-retention strategy.

Companies often make crucial mistakes when trying to protect trade secrets, sometimes relying on policies that actually lead to more information being divulged.

Before investing in China, venture capitalists and private equity investors need to take the time to understand the differences between Eastern and Western business practices.