Make Sure You Own the Gain of Open Innovation Efforts – Part I
If you are own your business, it is crucial to learn about the way to own the fruits of any contract or transaction you are involved including an opening of innovation. Innovation like a game and you probably realize that Open Innovation is “hot”. A lot of businesses or companies frequently have deal with Innovation include the big companies like HP, IBM and Microsoft. As you are in the line of business and need to get involve to the Open Innovation efforts, what you must know is if your company is not careful, you could end up sharing patent rights to any inventions resulting from your Open Innovation collaborations.
Before going down to the Open Innovation game, it is important to learn how to prevent collaborators outside your company from owning the gains of your company’s innovations. This is simply issue to address on the front end of the Open Innovation process and should be standardize for any innovation professional. However, not all business schools provide the subject cover intellectual property strategy, then the simple issues such as this will often be overlooked by innovation professionals and result in disastrous eventually. This article is a good place where allow you to learn how to protect the benefit that your company should be get as well as the way to prevent you from making a huge mistake in your Open Innovation efforts.
Whenever your company collaborates with someone who is not an employee, it means that persons are allowed to owns any patent resulting from that collaboration which is allow them to use the jointly patented product or technology without payment to your company. More significantly that the many companies often overlook and lead them in the result of disaster is the collaborator can freely license the jointly patented product or technology to a competitor of the companies.
For getting more understand about collaboration between your company and someone outside, assume you are a Director of Innovation at IBM. Your innovation team decides that the company can improve the innovation pipeline by going outside the company for new product ideas. To do this, the way you and your team choose is finding out an independent product development consultant and Dr. Clever is the one you select to work with IBM to develop a new product. After your consumer testing show that the product developed by the ideas of Dr. Clever likely be a blockbuster new product and become a top hit product in the market now, you correctly decided that IBM should file for patent protection. But, you know that Dr. Clever participated with your team in the invention of your new product, so it mean Dr. Clever is as much an owner of the patent on the product as IBM and he can use or license the patented invention in any way he want. It means if he can freely license his patent rights to the biggest competitor of IBM if he wants.
This is example that can be found in many cases where the companies not recognize about intellectual property strategy when they establish the Innovation game. However, you can learn how to end up this problem In Part Two.
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