Sorry to interrupt the Series talk here, but I thought this bit from the NYT business section today was relevant re: how our G&K menagerie protects and extends turf through IPR. Direct applicability to Q, GMST; mentions Dell as an example. (Emphases mine.)
-Rose (who still has 2,500 posts to catch up on here since falling off the wagon during vacation in mid-August, but who still intends somehow to do so...)-
-----------------------------------------------------
New Books on Patent Data and Intellectual Property
by TERESA RIORDAN
Along with the proliferation of new patents, it seems, comes a proliferation of new patents books.
The one with perhaps the best shot at the business best-seller list is "Rembrandts in the Attic," to be published next month by Harvard Business School Press. The title comes from a term commonly used to describe potentially lucrative patents that sit collecting dust in a company's file cabinets.
The authors, Kevin G. Rivette and David Kline, emphasize the strategic importance of intellectual property by giving example upon example in which patents (or their lack) have been crucial to the fortunes of such companies as Texas Instruments and Kodak.
They urge companies to follow the example of Xerox, which was smart enough to learn from its legendary failure to patent a graphical user interface that later became the basis for Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows operating systems.
G. Richard Thoman, the current chief executive of Xerox, was hired in part for his intellectual property savvy, Rivette and Kline write. By contrast, they say, "most businesses today still concentrate patent responsibilities in the legal department -- the one group in the company, ironically, that is specifically not trained to make business decisions."
At its core, this book is a how-to manual for ferreting out valuable information from huge patent data bases that are now easily accessible on line (indeed, this is the essence of a new business, Aurigin Systems, which Rivette recently co-founded). And to think that only a few years ago, one had to clip patent abstracts out of the Official Patent Gazette and hand-collate them to analyze patent trends or figure out what the competition was up to. This is no longer true. "New electronic patent data bases, combined with automated data-mining and visualization tools, have reduced the time needed for intellectual property analysis from months to just hours," the authors write.
The most obvious use of such patent analysis is to help a company get stronger patents to protect its new or existing products. But, as Rivette and Kline point out, this information can be used for more than simply protecting one's latest widget. Using what the authors call "patent mapping," a company can more efficiently build a thicket of patents around a competitor's products. Or a company can determine which of its own patents are frequently cited as "prior art" in other inventors' patent applications -- and thereby identify patents for which they might want to try to extract licensing fees from other companies.
Similar analysis can yield potential buyers for a company or even help poach hot engineering talent from other companies.
So who in the technology sector has been particularly smart about intellectual property? The answer, according to the authors, is Dell Computer, which patented the manufacturing, distribution and marketing methods used in its build-to-order computer sales systems. |
