Edison in the Boardroom Revisited: How Leading Companies Realize Value from Their Intellectual Property, Second Edition

Why Update Edison in the Boardroom?

Over the decade since the original Edison was published, the ICM Gathering companies have continued to meet and discuss how to create and extract ever more value from their intangibles, particularly in the face of the rapidly changing business and IP environments.

Sharon Oriel, CEO of Talisker Consulting and a member of The Gathering since its inception, explains, “Gathering companies are able to share what they do to manage their patents, so that Gathering companies are able to learn from each other and yet no competitive advantages are lost by the sharing company. Why is that? The reason is that the ‘what’ is shared and discussed, but not the ‘how.’ Since each company needs to adapt the ‘what’ to their own company, each company is free to create a competitive advantage with how they implement the new IP process[es].”

But many of the best practices mentioned by Gathering members in the original Edison began to change. As the first decade of the new century progressed, significant changes began to appear, along with changes in the world of technology, such as cloud computing,2 Skype, and the iPad. For their part, the grantors of intellectual property rights revolutionized their own technology through such innovations as the electronic Priority Document Exchange (PDX).3 Gathering companies began to recognize that their IP management techniques were evolving to reflect the changing state of the IP and business worlds.

Eventually the Gathering companies ...