Having described the modern Intellectual Property Business Management (IPBM) model in our prior post, we now focus on a key driver in the shift toward IPBM - the challenge of cultivating and protecting innovation. Nurturing the participation of inventors and IP asset developers is paramount in this movement. Increasingly, the leading IPM systems vendors have sought to develop new tools to better engage and empower all stakeholders in the innovation lifecycle. Many of the advanced solutions covered in the 2022 Hyperion Intellectual Property Management MarketView™ report have introduced new and improved tools to drive invention disclosure, information disclosure (IDS) and prior art searching processes.

Inviting more people to the party

This is partly a result of better understanding of user personas. In the IPBM model, attorneys, inventors, and business executives play important roles in the innovation lifecycle. Despite a historical focus on the docketers and paralegals who handle data entry, vendors are now addressing the needs of the lifecycle’s upstream and downstream stakeholders.  IPBM advances “innovation in context” and newly developed tools invite users into a harmonized information management process for better outcomes.

The value of sophisticated innovation management is derived from the deliberate involvement of multidisciplinary stakeholders, whether R&D specialists, scientists, engineers, business managers, marketing managers or C-suite executives.  Innovation management is necessarily broad -- inclusive of patentable technology, protectable trademarks, copyright protected content, vital trade secrets and institutional know-how that strengthen an organization’s ability to compete. And there is tremendous business value through involvement of multidisciplinary stakeholders which arms decision-makers with the ability to contemplate the potential business impact of innovation. [More on capturing data in a later post in this series]

Making sure all voices are heard

Improving the tools that connect stakeholders, including law firms and other outside providers, is another element driving innovation management in an IPBM paradigm. Collaboration tools – hardly a new idea – have long failed to deliver any real collaboration, often settling for an online document repository (typically manually maintained and woefully out-of-date). However, IPBM addresses the root cause of legacy collaboration failures with a focus on 1) incorporating cross-disciplinary lifecycle participation, and 2) integration and alignment of workflows. 

IPBM is not a “collaboration portal;” rather, it is a paradigm designed from the ground up to involve stakeholders when and as they are needed in the process (both as active participants and passive monitors), with audience-specific information.  This new approach can be seen in emerging vendor efforts to provide tools that not only capture and protect innovation, but also encourage it through social media-like extensions of their platforms.

In the future, inventors will more easily work as a community, not only collaborating on new ideas, but also leveraging crowd-sourcing concepts to facilitate awareness and promote winning ideas within this extremely important and historically underserved user community. 

The unifying technology framework that underpins IPBM will be discussed in the next installment of this series.