Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity

Chapter 19. Note on intellectual property rights (IPR)

The basic Bell patents for the telephone were defended in court and the survival of Bell Telephone was ensured by a few crude notes made by Bell on the back of an envelope which (luckily) had been properly signed, witnessed and dated.

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As innovation is often risky and costly, most companies are quite keen to protect their innovations for as long as possible through patents and other forms of intellectual rights protection. How important, and how effective, the protection of intellectual property is will vary from industry to industry. In the pharmaceutical industry where research and development costs are immense, patents play an important role in paying for future R&D activities. The exclusivity for the duration of the protection also allows companies to charge a premium which tends to get eroded once 'generics' come onto the market. This makes timing quite critical: registering a patent too early means that the company is losing out on profits, if the team wait too long there is a danger that a competitor might get a registration first. This conflict was alluded to in the Roche case study.

On the other hand, there are people who believe that making intellectual property freely available can be greatly beneficial. During a recent workshop at the leading edge innovation consultancy IDEO one of their staff commented, "We believe that ideas are free. It is what you do with them that creates ...