User Insights

During this past week, Innography held its annual user conference.  It is always energizing to hear about the real world challenges that our customers solve using Innography software and services.  The deals concluded, the risks avoided, and the millions of dollars saved or made emphasize the importance of intellectual property to corporate results.

Perhaps the most significant trend observed though, is how IP strategy has spread across the organization. Gone are the days when a good IP strategy meant a filing incentive for inventors or active management of portfolio renewals.

Today’s progressive companies think of IP across their value chain.  IP informs their competitive and market analysis. They use IP to help plan their development efforts.  They think about the IP implications of acquisitions.  They have a proactive strategy for creating additional revenue streams from their existing IP.  Plus, IP considerations are an integral part of their risk mitigation efforts.

Intellectual property has become far more than just a legal consideration.  It is now a key component of business strategies and an important contributor to business results.  Learn more at www.innography.com.

Since Innography was established almost six years ago, we’ve grown to service more than 6800 users from 300 companies. What’s even more amazing, is we’ve grown organically. In other words, we’ve pounded some serious pavement. We have been very successful meeting key contacts and finding great value the old fashioned way, face to face meetings at industry events and tradeshows.

With technology enhancements such as WebEx and Skype, personal interaction seems to be on the decline, but we believe that technology will never replace the importance of good old fashioned face time, and we’re not talking about the Apple app. Besides, where else can you be put into a room with your target audience? Without further ado, in no particular order here are Innography’s top events for meeting with customers and prospects.

Innography Insights

What can we say; we put on a great conference. Our Insights conference is in its fourth year and has grown tenfold since we started it. It is limited to customers only, but we can truly say the best and brightest in the IP industry come together in Austin for four days of intense training, networking and all things IP.

CoDev

We have had the pleasure of both attending and presenting at CoDev in beautiful La Jolla. This show brings together heavy hitters such as Kraft, Qualcomm and P&G, as well as lesser known organizations to share and discuss current open innovation practices. Open innovation is a key aspect in intellectual property, and this show enables attendees to meet potential partners and licensing candidates to improve their market share.

IP Strategy Summit: Monetization

We’ll attend this show for the first time in April, but based on the list of speakers and past attendees, we’re excited. The title says it all; this show is focused around extracting the most value out of one’s IP portfolio. Key topics include IP valuation, monetization models, running a licensing program, and building a monetization strategy. As far as attendees go, it’s more about quality than quantity. They typically have 100-200 attendees, but they represent key IP decision makers, as well as some high profile in-house counsels.

Consero’s General Counsel Forum

The Consero Group produces several high quality forums throughout the year, and the General Counsel Forum is no exception. One of the few events we’ve found that focuses on the growing importance of the GC role; this forum brings it with its quality attendees and workshops. Even though this event isn’t necessarily IP specific, the majority of GC’s here count IP as one of their main responsibilities and therefore, it is often a high priority topic of discussion.

Consero’s IP Management Forum

One of the few completely IP-focused events on our list, Consero’s IP Management Forum takes an unapologetic look at the key issues surrounding IP today. Whether it’s discussing the America Invents Act, patent troll protection strategies, or Chinese patent law, count on Consero to be on top of all the latest IP trends, as well as provide valuable insights on how to navigate the ever changing IP landscape.

LES Annual Meeting

One of the largest shows on the list, the Licensing Executive Society Annual Meeting boasts more than 1,000 attendees over a three day period jam packed with education sessions, networking events, and even a Tech Fair. Attendees span industry segments such as software and biotech to consumer and pharma, and their roles range from business development to R&D. This year’s theme, “Why IP Matters in Every Deal,” examines the growth and impact IP has had on business spanning from M&A, litigation, and of course, licensing.

American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA)

Much like Consero, the AIPLA hosts multiple regional events throughout the year, however, AIPLA events maintain a core IP focus. Attendees tend to vary depending on the region, but you can be sure that you’ll be rubbing elbows with the best and the brightest in IP law. Their flagship events, the Spring and Annual meetings, provide valuable CLE’s to attendees, as well as focus on IP topics that are important to clients.

World IP Business Congress (IPBC)

The IPBC has quickly established itself as the world’s principal forum for senior thought leaders in the IP business. This to-be-seen scene is hosted in various locations worldwide, and remains a who’s who in the IP World. Boasting speakers from leading organizations such as Reebok, MIT, and Intel, the IPBC crowd distinguishes itself as true thought leaders and navigators in the ever changing IP landscape.

Did we miss any? We’d love to hear what you think are the “can’t miss” shows related to IP. For a full list of where Innography is represented, visit our Events page.

As a Senior Product Manager at Innography, I have the privilege of working closely with our client base, as well as our engineering team to ensure our products help our customers find better IP insights, faster. In this role, I have seen customers be blown away by our software and become instant champions for our products. Yet I have also seen some grow frustrated over the hundreds of nuances that accompany most IP tasks and simply give up.

As you know, intellectual property isn’t just your lawyer’s problem anymore. We’ve found that companies with no intellectual property holdings are starting to receive multiple infringement letters a year. And on the other hand, there are corporations built solely on IP practices. In the midst of tech patent wars and the America Invents Act, intellectual property has proved itself to be a company’s most valuable, or most dangerous, asset.

The idea of the Playbooks was born at our 2011 customer Boot Camp as we searched for a better way to provide product training. Client size and industry didn’t matter, as there were a handful of common IP problems that almost every company seemed to face. Yes, we “IP nerds” love to get deep into the belly of the Innography product and learn every little detail about each patent that our competitors own and could potentially use against us, but most people really just care about the outcome. How can I answer this difficult IP question quickly and efficiently?

In response to this challenge, we have worked long and hard to gather best practices from some of the most efficient IP pros in the world. We have taken what we’ve learned, bundled it, and created simple step-by-step “Plays” that produce factual, usable and  insight-rich reports in just a few minutes.  Think TurboTax® for the IP world. With Innography’s new Playbooks, literally anyone can run a Play to gain a better understanding of who they should be licensing to, how to respond to an infringement letter, and how attractive and risky an M&A candidate is. Our goal is to make these common IP functions accessible to any person with a need, no matter what their IP experience.

Our initial offering includes three complete Playbooks:

• Innography Licensing Playbook™
• Innography Litigation Playbook™
• Innography M&A Playbook™

I predict this will be invaluable to our users. We’ve been running the Beta program for the past three weeks and have received great feedback. I am looking forward to hearing more about how you plan to use the Innography Playbooks, and what insights they lead you to find.

If you have any questions regarding the Playbooks, feel free to contact me directly at kodland@innography.com, or contact your account executive for more information.

Kent Odland

Senior Product Manager

While we’ve all known the U.S. has been in a recession for some time, NBER finally made it official, admitting that the current recession began in December 2007. This revelation begs the question, “What now?” My last post described how past recessions have led to increased intellectual property litigation, but it didn’t cover innovation trends. The latest and most interesting of these trends is Open Innovation.

Open Innovation is most crucial in a down market when costs-cutting measures and layoffs are adopted and companies are once again required to do more with less. They no longer have the luxury of large R&D budgets and overhead expenses. Excessive budgets and long development cycles simply cannot be supported in such economic environments. Rather, companies need to get a product to market as quickly and inexpensively as possible — and Open Innovation represents a badly needed solution.

Today the term innovation tends to be overused business jargon that is meant to suggest a more effective use of business resources, but Open Innovation is actually something quite different. It’s a concept that acknowledges the reality that innovation happens everywhere — not just inside your corporate walls. Embracing Open Innovation means that you adopt the practice of acquiring innovative IP outside your company and merging it with your own IP pool.

The key to Open Innovation is where to find it. Ideas can be found everywhere, but finding those ideas that relate to a customer’s pain is difficult. Simply put, you need to know what you don’t know — a vexing task at best.

For example, pharmaceutical companies regularly work with universities to help harvest ideas and to commercialize them. But if you don’t have an established relationship with someone, how do you know when an opportunity even exists? While there is no short answer, the best advice I can give you is to seek out and discover customer pain.

In a down economic market, customer pain will speak the loudest. If a customer is not in pain, they won’t buy the aspirin. Focusing on customer pain will illuminate a path to its most appropriate solution.

To illustrate, let me provide a real-world example. One of our customers was considering a move into the Green technology space given its recent focus and customer demand. However, they soon discovered that there are many definitions for Green technology and the company needed to get to market quickly. Their conundrum: how do we meet this customer demand and fulfill their perception of the company as going Green, and still go to market without years of research delays?

The solution: rely on key words in your patent search that relate to the attributes of the problem (e.g. anti-microbial, recyclable, hygienic, odor controlling, etc). Doing so can yield opportunities outside your industry that you might not have considered. This company did exactly that and what they discovered was startling.

The results initially seemed incorrect because they were previously unaware that the IP they uncovered even existed — precisely because it was outside their industry. By asking why something showed up outside their industry within their innovation landscape, they were able to discover what they didn’t know existed. The ultimate result was that they found a medical technology comprising all the attributes of the solution they were seeking as a naturally occurring substance.

Having this information in turn enabled them to get to market faster, create a new product, partner with a leading supplier and innovate without having to create it all in house — a perfect example of Open Innovation.

Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.  –Albert Einstein

One of the things I’m constantly asked about is the specifics of our search capability. I’ll often run down the list, from the common to the more obscure. Overall, the response to our breadth of options has been very positive.

I’ve even gotten involved with porting some of the queries from different engines to ours. This can be a dizzying experience. The level of complexity in some of these queries is amazing.

For the more involved case (and even for the simple one) it’s good to take a step back and focus on the goal of the project. Often the questions are much more mundane than the queries. What’s happened is that the user has been forced over time to modify the query to get a relevant data set. This caused a morphing of what was once probably something very simple and clear. Some users are so used to this that they can write (and even think) in this complex boolean logic.

The answer is usually not in directly porting the boolean logic to our system. By understanding the goal, the options available with Innography can often rescue us from this unnecessary complexity.

Being in the right vicinity is the most important part of the answer. I lightly touched on the advantages of the patent classification system in my last blog post. The classification system is one of the vicinities. By limiting your search space to relevant technologies and applications, your query can be simplified to more easily capture the relevant data.

There are other vicinities. A list of competitors, a date range, or even inventors can all be vicinities. Even business information such as revenues or the amount of intellectual property litigation might give you a vicinity. It all depends on the final goal.

The filters available on the left side of any result set are how you can get to the right vicinity. I’ve been able to assist our users in transforming complicated, hierarchical boolean logic down to just a few plain keywords with a few filters. When that happens, even I can understand what’s being searched.

The added advantage to simplified search is that our users are able to easily modify it to get immediate insights. This changes the game. It makes the patent search process about insights rather than data retrieval. Pushing the insights into the search process gives our users the power to make decisions during the research rather than as a result of it. It might take a little while to get used to this process, but once implemented our users find it invaluable.