Innovate or Perish: Managing the Enduring Technology Company in the Global Market

Organizational Approach

As noted above, the “market and commercialize” IP management strategy is best implemented under a functionally diverse organizational design. The key functional and skill areas include portfolio management, business development, finance, and legal.

Portfolio Management

Portfolio management is the most technical of the functional areas, drawing on staff members with significant technical training and experience. These experts provide the underlying technical and operational diligence and planning related to asset commercialization. To do so, the team draws on extensive experience in bringing technology from concept to market delivery to ensure a realistic assessment of the IP’s scope and uses, and how best to realize deployment ready solutions. Particularly with early-stage innovations, lab results and implementations are a long way from market-deployable offerings since they often rely on very controlled environments or narrow parameters to operate. Moreover, the market opportunity may require extension or integration with other components or capabilities. This integration and development effort must be defined in terms of functional or development needs, estimated in terms of time and cost, and a determination made of dependencies and resource requirements to implement the commercial version of the IP. Accuracy in these estimates is important to determining the potential market timing of product introduction, costs incurred by a partner or licensee to ...