In today’s world, intellectual property is the life’s blood of value creation in the corporate setting. But, often corporate intellectual property departments are treated as just patent generation machines, with little input into the strategy of the corporation. This approach does not capitalize on the expertise and agility of an intellectual property department to achieve business goals; specifically access to market for innovations that will generate profit.
Here, we discuss best corporate practices to exploit the capabilities of a corporate intellectual property department and how best to structure it to meet a company’s changing needs. There are various approaches for organizing an intellectual property function. It can be a central corporate function reporting to the legal organization that acts as a hub of intellectual property resources for business units and management or it can be a hybrid organization. This hybrid organization allows IP lawyers to work directly with business unit teams to handle each unique business need. These lawyers would be involved in every strategy meeting of their assigned business units. They would report into a Head of Global Intellectual Property. This would enable the Head of Global Intellectual Property to mobilize additional resources as required to serve the needs of businesses that have different business models. The Head of Global Intellectual Property would also be a central repository of information about what different business units are doing and suggest synergies. The Head of Global Intellectual Property apprises management of any significant developments, potential business synergies, or risks. This model is particularly suited for the multinational entity which serves different markets with different business models. The intellectual property department in its very foundation must be (1) flexible, (2) agnostic to corporate re-organization, and (3) ready to address business and market changes rapidly. The concepts of flexibility and market oriented approach may be counter-intuitive to the traditional view of an intellectual property department. The rapidly changing dynamics of our market demands it and the technical mindset and backgrounds of IP lawyers lends itself to implementing such a structure if managed properly.
