Anya Hornsey, IP Rights Manager, powerHouse
by Anya Hornsey
IP Rights Manager, powerHouse
Many of the turf wars you will face in business will involve intellectual property (IP).
This intangible asset is of crucial importance in the global, information-driven business environment. You will use your IP assets to help achieve your business goals; your competitors will just as easily use their IP dominance to bring you down if you are a juicy enough target.
So you need strategies to ensure your intellectual property assets contribute to the success of your business and minimise your vulnerability to attack.
IP strategy is a game, a battlefield, with its own rules of engagement. It is best to understand the game and use the rules to your advantage, even if you disagree with them or think them unfair. Play to the edge of the rules, and understand that your foes will play right to the edge, or even cross the line.
One of the greatest warriors of all time, Sun Tzu, created priceless strategic guidelines in his work The Art of War. Back in 500BC China, Sun Tzu’s interests were more directed to tangible real estate than intellectual assets, but in the 21st Century IP almost defines the competitive landscape of business.
Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
He gives us four principles that can be applied when approaching the design of IP strategy.
- Know yourself – Do an IP audit and understand your assets, knowledge, people – everything that gives you a competitive advantage.
- Know the battleground – Understand your competitors, their IP strategies, know the early adopters who would use your innovation, how litigious the industry is, and how high the entry barriers are. For instance, in high tech industries where the landscape is crowded you may find you need to have a strong patent of your own in order to give investors the confidence to walk onto the battlefield with you
- Know the enemy – Understand your freedom to operate. Know who is going to stop you from selling your product where and when you want to sell it. Competitors can deny you freedom to operate by accumulating a mix of barriers including IP rights, contractual advantages and regulatory standards that could block your ability to market your innovation.
- Play to your strengths – You will prevail in battle with an effective IP strategy. This identifies the right mix of tools to achieve your business goals given the specific IP landscape in which you operate, your business model, and what funding you have available.
As Sun Tzu teaches us, awareness is key. The better informed you are, the easier it will be to navigate around the barriers. You can use the tools available to experiment, to learn quickly and cheaply, and to play the game to your own advantage.
IP fights break out not only over the protection of turf, but because significant financial spoils are at stake. For this reason, your IP battles may come relatively late in the life of your business, once you have grown large and profitable enough to threaten or tempt someone to attack. But if you wait until the barbarians are at the gate before you create your IP strategy, you will be too late.
There is no cookie cutter approach to designing an IP strategy, but there is a useful process. The next article in this series explains how to approach the design of an IP strategy for your business.
Disclaimer: powerHouse is an early stage investment and incubation company and services offered are on a commercial basis, focused on identifying areas of risk and opportunity. This article contains information about legal matters but does not constitute legal advice and should not be treated as such. It is recommended that you engage patent attorneys or legal counsel for technical opinions and/or registration of IP rights.