Monthly Archives: June 2010

IP Management Step 2: Identifying the Issues

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“Managing” intellectual property means proactively creating value.  The collection of facts you generated in Step 1 will include a number of gems – opportunities for you to create BIG value.  These are the issues upon which you should focus your innovation.

You probably already identified some while doing your data collection.  It is common to have some Aha! moments (and I hope you noted your Aha! when it occurred – if not you’ll do it during subsequent projects).  To find more issues, try these three exercises.

First, look for the opportunities specific to your product, service, or process.

  • Evaluate how well your product performs for each of the stakeholder actions for which you’ve compiled a description of value.  Where does your product underperform?  That’s low hanging fruit for innovation.
  • What are the biggest gripes about your product?  These are clear opportunities.
  • What are the stakeholder actions that are the clumsiest, based on what stakeholders say?  Fix them and you add value.

Second, look at the market or industry.

  • What are the obvious market trends that you can take advantage of?  More low hanging fruit.
  • What are the challenges in your market that everyone has given up on?  Every market or industry has some “holy grail” that all competitors have stopped chasing because they believe it is impossible.  Don’t buy into the negative hype – these are great opportunities for innovative thinking to create huge value.
  • What directions are the major competitors moving?  Maybe you can move swiftly and get there first.  Maybe you can flank them.  Maybe you can leapfrog them.  Maybe it’s the wrong direction (based upon what your study of value has shown).
  • What directions are the new upstart companies moving?  Are they hitting the value points your study identified?  How will that affect the market?  What will the major competitors do?

Third, look outside your market and industry.

  • What are the best companies (no matter the industry or market) doing that is noteworthy?  Maybe you can adopt or adapt that.
  • What are the new inventions in other fields that may remotely touch your field?  Maybe you can adopt or adapt them.
  • What industry or market best fulfills some of the “holy grails”or unfulfilled value points in your industry?  Adopt or adapt.

You now have not only a collection of facts about value in your industry, but you have an identified list of the issues that can be most valuable for you to address.

Next: Inventing Potential Solutions

IP Management Step 1: Learn the Facts

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For intellectual property to possess value, it must provide value for a company’s products, services, or processes – and they only generate value when they come into contact with people.  So, we first have to answer two questions.

  1. Who are the people who will touch the product, service, or process?
  2. What do they value?

Understanding value across your various stakeholder groups is where your intellectual property management system should start.  The general framework is simple enough: for each group of people that touch any particular product, service, or process, study and record what people value.

  • Internal departments
  • Key suppliers
  • Customer segments
  • Distribution channel
  • Service entities
  • Other partners or collaborators

How?  One on one interviews, observations, focus groups, customer service feedback, and so forth.  Ask about problems, ask about dreams, ask what they like, ask what they don’t like.  Have them describe a day with the product, have them demonstrate it to you, have them walk you through different things they do with the product.  Listen to gripes.  Ask why.  Ask for an explanation.  Don’t leave until you understand you understand how they work with and feel about the product.

The more stakeholder groups from which you learn and the more in depth you learn from each group, the more complete your knowledge.  Take good notes – this is the start of your intellectual property collection.

To organize this collection of facts, break all of the thoughts from those interviews, observations, and other feedback apart – and then categorize the individual thoughts.  One useful way to do this is to sort the comments by the action being performed.  So, for example, you end up with all of the retail merchandising comments together, all of the user interface comments together, all of the repair comments together, etc.

Congratulations.  You now have an organized collection of facts about what people value about your product, service, or process.

Next:  Identifying the Issues

Visible Intellectual Property Management

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In a soon-to-be-published book, The Visible Business, Chris Pelz and I present a framework for how to develop a business strategy that has a direct line of sight from the facts surrounding the business, through the issues that the business faces, to the potential solutions for those issues, and finally to the selected and deployed strategy(ies).

The intellectual property management framework that I recommend,  Visible Intellectual Property Management, will generally follow those same principles.

  1. Learn the Facts
  2. Identify the Issues
  3. Invent Potential Solutions
  4. Select and Deploy the Best Solutions

The framework takes some inspiration from discussions I’ve had with a good friend, Jim Bradley, an inventor, problem solver, thinker, and multiple patent contributor who is retired from Navistar.  Over the past couple of years we have met for lunch periodically to talk about our common interest in innovation.  It was through those discussions that I discovered that innovation is just one subset of a larger system – intellectual property management.

The framework also owes a big debt of inspiration to Ron Sears of the Design Consortium.  I worked together with Ron for a few years and, like an apprentice, learned his Product Value Matrix (PVM)sm product development and innovation methodology.  Ron lives and breathes value creation, and his PVM process is the best process I know for producing innovation on demand.  Although I cannot borrow wholesale sections of PVM – a proprietary process – and present them to you,  I will sometimes direct you to the website pvmspec.com, where you can read about PVM in detail.  By the way, ”Product Value Matrix” and “PVM” are service marks of the Design Consortium.

Many intellectual property management systems start at the point where a patent disclosure is made.  I now think that the point of invention is far too late to start managing your intellectual property.  It is at least as important, if not more important, to first understand the value system of your products, services, and processes before you start to invent.

Many companies would claim that the front end of understanding the value system is the responsibility and domain of a marketing department, while the back end of pursuing patent applications is an entirely separate process that is the responsibility of an intellectual property or legal department.  As you read my subsequent posts, you will see that I believe they are both part of the same process, and should not be treated separately.

Next: Learning the Facts

A New View of Intellectual Property Management

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If you read yesterday’s post, you may have gone away thinking that I just bash patents 100% of the time.  Not true.  My position is that for the bootstrapped small entrepreneur who is implementing a clever, but probably not novel, business concept, a patent may not be in order.

But, I fully understand that some companies actively manage intellectual property portfolios in order to gain or maintain strategic advantage.  And they have hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to spend on management.  For these companies, I will be explaining in future innovation posts how they can adopt a broader and more valuable system of IP management.

Intellectual property management often starts at the point of a disclosure.  An employee invents or designs something that has merit to be novel and patentable.  The company determines if the cost of prosecuting a patent application is warranted (is the invention strategic, is it indeed novel, is there prior art, how much will it gain the company versus cost the company?).  Patent applications are filed, extensions are filed, variations are created, patents received are defended, etc.  The company owns a comfy bundle of strategic IP.

In a nutshell, I will be outlining a front end system that integrates with these current systems – an expanded view of what “intellectual property” is.  The system does two things:

  1. Provides and captures a strong market-based understanding of customer and stakeholder value.  The idea here is that if your company understands customers and stakeholders better than the competition, you are in a much better position.
  2. That greater understanding provides you the fodder to brainstorm  and innovate solutions that your competitors can’t envision. So, instead of waiting for some random event to produce a disclosure, and then hope that it is strategic and valuable, you create your own.  Inventions, that because they were borne of a deep understanding of value, are much more likely to be valuable parts of your IP portfolio.

No patent bashing, I promise.

To Patent or Not to Patent

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This weekend I met with a group of inventors that I host every month at the Innovation Center.

Eventually, the discussion turned to patents and intellectual property.  A few participants seemed enormously concerned with protecting their property – making sure that patent applications had been filed before talking with anybody about anything.  One assumed that I felt the same, and while telling a newbie that he should first get a patent application filed, he said, “And Steve will tell you to get that going right away, too.”

Well, for some of the entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, like those in the orthopedic field, a granted patent is key to an exit strategy.  But, generally I DON’T agree that a patent application should be a staple in an entrepreneur’s plan, and I told them so.  Here’s why.

For most everyday entrepreneurs, there are five reasons why a patent application may not make sense.

  1. The likelihood of your idea being novel enough to result in some granted claims is slim.  I know – I just called your baby ugly.  But, face facts – you can have a great business concept that will make all sorts of money, and not be novel enough to warrant a patent claim.
  2. It costs money to find out if you can be granted a patent, money that at the early stage of a business is better spent on getting a product finished and ready to sell or talking with customers.  A good patent attorney can save you from filing for something that is clearly not novel – but his incentive is to make money and help you file something (for a fee).
  3. The same patent attorney that can help you file most likely also devotes part of his practice to helping people design around existing patents.  So the value of the patent you may some day receive may not be as great as you thought.
  4. Time is not on your side.  A patent application will take years to prosecute.  I’m hoping that you want to be to market WELL before that.  Why would you take time (and money, remember) from that process?  In the software, web, mobile, and computer technology fields, technology generations can turn over multiple times before you receive your grant.
  5. OK, let’s say that you do receive your patent.  And then some large corporation violates it (in your opinion, that is).  Do you have the funds to prosecute the violation?  Is your market (and net profit) large enough to warrant a long, costly lawsuit?

So, am I trying to be Mr. Doom and Gloom here?  Of course not.  I just want you to key on what is important – developing your product, talking with your customers, and gaining traction.

Qualities of an Entrepreneur – Part 5 of 5

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This post concludes the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center’s BizWiz student venture group‘s discussion about:

  1. “If you could hang out with any entrepreneur or leader, who would that be?”
  2. “Why did you choose that person – what quality do they have that you admire and would want to learn from him or her?”

I think this is probably the most importantly quality of all:

Entrepreneur Quality Number 5 – The Ability to Make the Impossible Possible

After we had talked about “outside the box” thinking, and being innovative, someone (sorry I don’t recall who), said they admired Thomas Edison for his ability to “make the impossible possible”.

The minute that I heard that phrase, I knew I liked it a lot better than “outside the box thinking”.  First of all, it has the magic word “make” in the phrase.  Entrepreneurs make things.  They don’t just think things (i.e. “think outside the box”).  Making stuff is a key attribute of every successful startup that I’ve seen.  They all start making their product from day one – they don’t “think” for a long time, go get some funding based solely on some idea, and then eventually maybe someday make something.  They make first – or concurrently.

I also love the idea of turning the impossible into the possible.  Isn’t that what we do when we find some unmet market need – or some unique differentiator – or some product or service that is completely novel?  Sure, once you’ve done it and people see that it is possible, all of the armchair quarterbacks will talk about how obvious it is – but before they saw what you did, it was impossible for all intents and purposes.  Even the armchair quarterbacks will have to agree that before you made your innovation, it was absolutely impossible for customers to achieve the value that your innovation now makes possible.

Entrepreneurs show the world that it is possible to provide value that was previously thought impossible, often in ways that were also thought impossible.  Is that cool or what!

Well, here ends this short series.  It’s probably time for you to quit reading anyway – and go make something!

Qualities of an Entrepreneur – Part 4 of 5

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This post continues the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center’s BizWiz student venture group‘s discussion about:

  1. “If you could hang out with any entrepreneur or leader, who would that be?”
  2. “Why did you choose that person – what quality do they have that you admire and would want to learn from him or her?”

Entrepreneur Quality Number 4 – Ability to Rebound

When you get knocked down, do you get up again?  Are they never going to keep you down?

If so, you may have the makings of an entrepreneur.  Yeah, we did say in earlier posts that decisiveness and holding strong opinions were admired qualities.  But, you have to be willing to change.

Markets constantly change.  Customers constantly change.  A strong opinion that was spot on two years ago in any technology field would probably look silly and naive today.  The facts upon which that opinion was formed will have changed dramatically.

Today’s buzzword seems to be “pivot”.  The best entrepreneurs look for ways to test their business models (i.e. their opinions of how the world works viz. a viz. their business), and then pivot in response to the results.  In the blogroll for this blog you’ll find a link to Steve Blank’s blog – the best (imho) advice about business models, testing, and pivoting.

One more thing.  Sometimes stuff just happens.  All of your assumptions may be right, your business model may be spot on – but some accident or event outside your control can happen (ask any shrimp fisherman on the Louisiana coast).

How you respond and rebound from adversity – and how you notice and respond to changes in your market - can make the difference between a resilient strong. growing venture, and one that gives up, fades away, and dies.

Qualities of an Entrepreneur – Part 3 of 5

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This post continues the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center’s BizWiz student venture group‘s discussion about:

  1. “If you could hang out with any entrepreneur or leader, who would that be?”
  2. “Why did you choose that person – what quality do they have that you admire and would want to learn from him or her?”

Entrepreneur Quality Number 3 – Be a Charismatic Marketer and an Inspiring Leader

Take a guess who received the most mentions as a “charismatic marketer”.  Did you say the master of the black turtleneck, Steve Jobs?  Regardless of whether you love or hate Apple, you have to admit that the guy is a darn good front man.  His presentation style has been talked about and written about a lot, including this presentation on SlideShare.

But, don’t you think that it goes a LONG WAY past mere presentation style?  The guy is the number one advocate for his venture and its products.  He never wavers.  He is uber confident.  He is SO into his products that it rubs off on you a bit.

One more thing.   If you listen to the press talk about Jobs, you will quickly find that he inspires people.  An alien stopping off at our planet would wonder just exactly what an Apple Fanboy is and what they are all doing hanging out outside those glass-front buildings overnight.  But, the mere fact that Apple has fans who line up outside stores overnight, sometimes even when they aren’t sure exactly what product will be announced, is a sure fire sign that they have been inspired.

And, although we hear less about it, he also inspires the people who work with him in his venture to create products that wow people.  Products that don’t compromise, but hold onto a vision of excellence that started with a guy in a black turtleneck at the top of the venture.

Wouldn’t you like a crowd of fans lining up to buy your stuff and hanging on your every word?  And a group of employees that shares your vision for excellence?  I can’t think of an entrepreneur who wouldn’t.

Qualities of an Entrepreneur – Part 2 of 5

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This post continues the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center’s BizWiz student venture group‘s discussion about:

  1. “If you could hang out with any entrepreneur or leader, who would that be?”
  2. “Why did you choose that person – what quality do they have that you admire and would want to learn from him or her?”

The second quality, or rather combination of qualities, of the top 5 provoked the most discussion.

Entrepreneur Quality Number 2 – Be Decisive, Be Evil – and Win!

The quality of decisiveness was cited first.  It was cited that some strong leaders tend to make good decisions, and it would be nice to know how they think.  As we discussed this, it became apparent that but it is not just the “rightness” of their decisions that is an important quality, but rather the pure decisiveness itself.  The fact is that they just plain make decisions – for right or wrong, they are decisive, not hesitant or wishy-washy – and that quality alone is valuable.

As you might guess, the discussion ranged around the “Be Evil – and Win”.  That particular reference stems from a scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley where Bill Gates persuades (or tricks via some sweet social engineering) Steve Jobs into giving him some pre-release Macs. That scene had stuck with Ray of Guild Press.

Although he articulated it with the words “be evil”, Ray didn’t really mean to suggest that you actually be evil (as in intentionally hurting people).  His concept is a bit more subtle.  Be evil and win == always be aware that you need to move your business forward and go after it unapologetically.  Let me repeat that – unapologetically.  You are in business for yourself – keep your self interest first.  No one else is going to do it for you!  It is OK to be selfish about your venture.  Bill’s job was to further Microsoft’s agenda – not Apple’s, so that is exactly what he did.

The “and win” is a nice reminder that you are not alone.  Others will be out there unapologetically acting in their venture’s self interest.  If you don’t take care of yours, you could lose – and that could mean folding a venture.

Qualities of an Entrepreneur – Part 1 of 5

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At the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center’s last BizWiz student entrepreneurship meeting, we had a discussion around two questions.

  1. “If you could hang out with any entrepreneur or leader, who would that be?”
  2. “Why did you choose that person – what quality do they have that you admire and would want to learn from him or her?”

The entrepreneurs cited were pretty diverse (but tended to be skewed toward gamers and technologists – go figure).  Gates and Jobs were the only entrepreneurs cited multiple times.  The others included Kevin Rose, the founders of Blizzard, Robert Bowling, Adam Savage, Napoleon Hill, Sam Walton, Leo Laporte, Thomas Edison, Dana White, Esther Dyson, and Michael Arrington.

We ended up with a list of five essential qualities that we felt an entrepreneur should possess.  I’ll cover each of those one at a time this week.

Entrepreneur Quality Number 1 – Form and Hold Strong Opinions

We had already gone around the table, and everyone had already given an opinion when Justin of Guild Press suggested he wanted to add another.  He suggested Michael Arrington (TechCrunch).  The reason he gave at first was that although Michael or his opinions aren’t always particularly liked, Michael had indeed created a hugely successful readership.

As we discussed the “why” in  more detail, it became apparent that it wasn’t just the following or readership that was as important as it was Michael’s ability to form and stick to an opinion, regardless of what others around him thought (or in his case, wrote, said, commented, broadcast, or otherwise published about him and/or his opinion).

We decided it deserved to be in the top 5 because without the ability for form a strong opinion, you may never get a venture started to begin with, and without the ability to hold onto that opinion in the face of detractors, you may not keep your venture going in the face of adversity.