innovation strategy – The Online Gazette…

If Your Business Depends on Intellectual Property

If your business depends on intellectual property (IP), then “best practices” for your IP business activities are those that…

…support the business objectives of the company and

…increase company value.

For any high-performing business, there are 4 key building blocks: strategy, processes, resources and organization. Here are these building blocks applied to IP business practices:

Strategy: Which invention concepts are we free to develop? Which are worth patenting? Can we/should we consider an Engineering-to-Own-the-Space^SM innovation Strategy? ¹
Processes: Who decides how and where we should invest our development dollars?
Resources: Can we accelerate our development or broaden our reach by bringing in technologies from the outside? If so, which ones, from where, and for how much?
Organization: Do our IP development initiatives and outcomes have top management’s attention, understanding, and endorsement?

Adopting high performance IP business practices can enable you to:

…strengthen and even shift the basis of your competition

…protect IP that delivers high value to your customers and end-users

…avoid product and/or technology obsolescence

We at Prakteka LLC developed our IP expertise in the context of numerous and diverse client assignments, all focused on using intellectual property to create and sustain business value. We are here to help you, too, maximize the impact of your IP on business value. For a plan customized to your needs, contact us at https://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/

For more on the “Engineering-to-Own-the-Space” Innovation Strategy, follow this link to the SlideShare presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/mhastbacka/engineeringtoownthespace-innovation-strategy

Engineering-to-Own-the-Space is a service mark of Prakteka LLC.

Lessons Learned in Technology Assessment…Lesson 5…

This is the fifth of a series of posts to share with you six important lessons we’ve learned through our experiences working with numerous commercial clients in a variety of situations. On the path to your success in developing and commercializing technologies, they will help you avoid common pitfalls, unwarranted assumptions, and other sources of technical and commercial bias that could add up to business failures.

Lesson Five.

More Facts Mean More Focus.

The “end game” of any technology assessment is to formulate and implement a plan of action – a plan that has beneficial business outcomes. Begin every technology assessment with that plan of action in mind. Doing so will drive you to develop more facts related to your implementation plan. And developing more facts will sharpen your focus and help establish priorities.

Lesson Five Case Study:

Client: Multi-plant commodity inorganic chemicals producer

Situation:

For both environmental as well as economic reasons, the client was interested in identifying ways to turn a waste stream into a marketable co-product.
The client had a vague idea that they could turn their waste stream into a mineral extender/filler/additive, but they were not currently selling into any markets with those types of raw material needs.

Technology Assessment Need: Develop and characterize the potential “product/market” roadmap that could be addressable by the client’s upgraded waste stream co-product.

Our approach:

Analyzed the economic balance point between purifying the waste stream and its saleability as a co-product
Researched industry needs, by market segment, in terms of particle size and purity
Balanced market segment needs against the cost of refining the waste stream into saleable form

Outcome: We identified sealants as an attractive application area for the client’s co-product and projected the size of the client’s addressable market for the next several years.

On the basis of our findings, the client decided to adjust their manufacturing plant to focus on the specifications needed for the sealant market and to begin commercial development efforts directed toward that market.

For more on best practices in moving from lab-to-market, see https://www.prakteka.com/category/technology-assessment/

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Are you looking for new customers for your existing technologies and products?

Do you have excess manufacturing capacity you’d like to put to use?

Or are you launching a new product and need to understand which end-use applications are the most promising?

We’re ready and able to help you make your decisions with confidence. Contact us at https://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/

or via direct email at mah@prakteka.com

Engineering-to-Own-the-Space…a Best Practice Innovation Strategy

Engineering to Own the Space^SM is a forward looking innovation and invention strategy. The objective of this strategy is to develop a proprietary position in target user/consumer benefit areas: instead of inventing just a new product, invent a new product space.

This invention strategy supports forward looking and commercially valuable patent strategies, by expanding the scope of innovation around specific inventions to gain broader patent protection and to inhibit “fast follow” by competition: instead of patenting to protect an invention, patent to protect the business area.

Key ANALYSIS steps in Engineering to Own the Space:

Gaps Assessment…..Detect vulnerabilities in existing intellectual property folios, focusing on linkages between IP and expected basis of commercial competitiveness
Cross-Domain^SM Audit…..Identify context-shift possibilities for specific innovations and technologies (yours or others), developed for use in one industry or application that can be re-directed to your target markets and applications
Own-the-Space Audit….. Identify the larger pool of innovations and technologies (patented or public domain; yours or others), all of which could functionally satisfy the high value market need you’ve targeted
“Design-Around”…..Develop alternative technical paths to the same functionality, all of which could functionally satisfy the high value market need you’ve targeted

These key analysis steps produce some powerful results, including revealing:

- “Holes” in patents that might allow competitors to innovate outside the protection of your patents
- Existing functionally equivalent inventions that have gone unnoticed because the underlying IP was developed in/for completely different end-use applications
- Novel technical paths to the same, or similar, end result as your original innovation

Use of Engineering to Own the Space (ETOS^SM) has helped numerous businesses build value, from technology start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Interested in finding out how ETOS can help you, too? Contact us at https://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/

And for more on what matters when you’re working at the technology/business interface, see our content on technology assessment, technology commercialization, technology valuation, and “seeing the future” on our website: https://www.prakteka.com/

Engineering to Own the Space, ETOS, and Cross-Domain are service marks of Prakteka LLC.

Coyright 2018