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

Linkages and Dependencies

There are linkages and dependencies among the legal, technical, and market measures of value, so weakness in one often diminishes value or viability in another. This negative dependency tends to propagate negative properties of innovation across value boundaries, while the positive elements tend to be more narrowly confined. Imagine an innovation around a new “killer app.” Further imagine enormous demand, and that the technology developed addresses the market need perfectly. Yet, if there is no way to get a position in the IP that supports and enables the technology, then there may not be a killer app after all. Prior art can kill your killer app, or perhaps just dilute your returns because you need to secure rights from third parties to practice your technology (as in our blue laser example where another company had blocking fundamental IP). Powerful advantage in both the market and technology measures of value is stymied by a weakness in the legal measures of value. An IAP portfolio, by its nature and purpose, attempts to anticipate and understand exactly this type of linkage scenario and enable educated decisions at an early stage of innovation investment about how to avoid or mitigate them: a simple, but powerful distinction between anticipating circumstances and later reacting to them. Getting to the value of the innovation asset is really a journey through all of those different worlds, and only then into the domain of value: a confluence of legal, ...