Business Power: Creating New Wealth from IP Assets

Chapter 3. IP and Its Effects on Corporate Research and Development

DR. VASSILIS KERAMIDAS

Surprisingly, the financial people are lagging behind. They are just beginning to appreciate the hidden use of IP assets: increased liquidity, agility, dispute resolution, cash flows, and earnings.

Key Points to Look For

• R&D has now become focused on short-term ROI rather than serving the company’s longer term strategic interests.

• The value creation path of innovate, create new technologies, and deploy in products and services, has been reduced from 15–20 years to 3–5 years because of short-term business driver intrusions into the R&D process.

• The typical CFO is unfamiliar and unconcerned with the opportunities and challenges of managing IP assets to create new wealth.

• The value extraction methods, while known to most, are by and large poorly executed, leaving the IP value largely ignored as the vital part of corporate business assets that it is.

• Companies can be more creative in their development of IP strategies by making more effective use of university research, innovative funding of R&D, internal valuation methods, and more aggressive and sophisticated value extraction strategies.

IP Impact on Research

I am a researcher, and consequently my comments will reflect this experience. I would like you to see my comments from that perspective. My focus is on the creation of IP and the impact of IP on the ...