July, 2020
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman is the author of "Protecting yourself against future patent litigation". INTRO: If you are reading this, it’s likely you are now involved in a patent litigation. It may be that this is your first patent litigation, and everything is new territory for you. Worse, it could be that this is another patent litigation and you’re frustrated, as you know it takes away valuable time, it’s disruptive to the business, and takes money. You may have fewer options than others in your same situation because the plaintiff is an NPE (Non-practicing entity), in which case, a countersuit is not possible. It is also very likely, if you’re reading this paper, that you have already engaged a law firm to help you with your case. This paper deals with companies in this predicament and how to enhance their position through various approaches to reduce risk.
February, 2020
Jeff Goodwin is the author of "AI Robots Running Your IP Renewal Strategy". SUMMARY: Companies have seen their IP portfolios grow significantly since the 1990s, but with a growing portfolio comes growing costs, both in prosecution and renewal fees. As the cost to maintain a portfolio continues to grow, companies need to start thinking smarter and more strategically about their portfolio and begin determining what qualifies as important IP (i.e., IP that provides value and ROI). What makes a patent valuable can vary between companies, which may be why there isn't a solution on the market to assist in IP renewal strategies. Where one company values a patent that protects a product, another may value IP with high licensing value and opportunity. Now there are IP management solutions on the market, but these solutions do just that, allow you to manage your IP; they don't help you value and determine which patents you should renew or not. Though these IP management tools do make paying renewal and maintenance fees a lot easier, many have automatic payments, so you never have to see the money leave. So, what is your IP renewal strategy? With growing IP portfolios, how can one reign in the costs and make their portfolio more valuable?
January, 2019
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman is the author of "EPO denies AI as Inventor". Summary: The European Patent Office EPO recently denied an application in which the inventor was listed as DABUS, “a type…of artificial intelligence,” ruling that the inventor must be a human being. 1 Not only does this argument fly in the face of the history of invention creating, but also certainly in the future of same. Invention by machine is inevitable it’s been with us in some form for decades and is accelerating quickly. The sooner we define the structure by which AI invention is acceptable, the sooner the EPO will be able to handle reality.
March, 2019
Charles Root is the author of "Business Innovation and the Craft Brewing Industry". ipCG is beginning to see a "cross pollination" happen in the brewing industry. Specifically with Robot Process Automation (RPA) which is a form of Artificial Intelligence. As such we see an opportunity to help breweries take advantage of emerging trends in this area. Beer production, whether you’re making five gallons or 50,000 barrels, comes down to one important thing: making a great tasting beverage. To do this, you need as much concentration on the art of the brew and solid understanding of the science as you can provide to your craft. If you can use innovation, either your own or someone else’s, to give you the time you need to perfect that art and science, and thus be competitive in an ever-shrinking market share, then you need to do so.
November, 2018
Michael Baker and Kennyn Statler, Consulting Manager, and are co-authors of "CRISPR Decision Highlights the Importance of Strategic Claims Drafting". Intro: The battle over CRISPR (Clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats) patents highlights the importance of having a sound patent strategy before filing the first disclosure. The University of California v. Broad Institute, Inc. is an excellent example of the difference a well-executed strategy can make. In 2013, teams from UC Berkeley and the Broad Institute filed applications seeking patents for the process of editing genetic information using the CRISPR-Cas9 protein. This came only months after both parties published scientific articles and filed provisional patents. Their strategies when filing their patent applications were distinct and the results decisive.
October, 2018
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman is the author of "AI Enters the IAM and IP Space as an App Store? You’re Kidding!". Intro: Artificial Intelligence (AI) goes back to the 1950’s, as defined by Minsky & McCarthy, to be “any task performed by a program or a machine that, if a human carried out the same activity, we would say the human had to apply intelligence to accomplish the task”. This being the case, a lot has happened in almost 70 years since that statement. The history of AI can be easily researched; however, a reasonable definition can also be extracted from examples of how AI is being used and what AI is being used for.
July, 2018
Adam Bulakowski, Principal Partner, is the author of "Winning in the knowledge economy". In this whitepaper, Adam discusses how companies (and countries) with unique, intangible assets and associated capabilities capture more of the value that they create from innovation activities (and remain competitive).
February, 2018
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, and Jacob Rosen, Chief Executive Officer and Matt Osman, Chief Technology Officer of Legit are co-authors of "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Invention Disclosures". Intro: Artificial Intelligence (AI), when implemented correctly, uses humans’ biggest weakness to its advantage: the management and analysis of huge quantities of data. Confronted with several million documents all containing different information, a legal practitioner's first goal will be to reduce that to a reasonable level. That is often what previous workflow technology has been previously used for, particularly in the legal realm. Document management systems filter by date, author and keywords, RSS feeds show only news stories pertaining to an attorney’s current cases and even the “find” function on PDFs documents help you ignore most of the target document. The performance of these tools does not improve when the amount of data it is tasked with handling increases, in fact in most cases it declines.
October, 2017
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, is the author of "Identify your Innovation Cosmic Event Before it's too Late!". In this whitepaper, John discusses that varying “Events” drive different Innovation needs which in turn create different Innovation processes. There are hundreds of "Events" that drive Innovation needs and each need requires different Innovation process solutions.
February, 2017
Adam Bulakowski, Principal Partner, is the author of "The VC’s playbook: Diligence essentials for technology-based IP". In this whitepaper, Adam discusses how VC investments can improve monetization options and mitigate risk when diligence considers IP assets from a holistic business perspective, beyond the traditional legal opinions.
October, 2016
Jeff Padgett, Senior Associate, is the author of "IP Trends in the Energy Value Chain". In this whitepaper, Jeff provides an overview of the Energy value chain and the role of IP. The dramatic growth of the energy industry over the past 15 years is reflected in both global revenues and patent filings. New technologies have driven this growth and served to reorganize the energy industry. Identifying the opportunities and creating new innovations will be the key to addressing the evolving market.
September, 2016
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, is the author of "Why Big Data is Key to Wearables for Sport". In this publication, Mr. Cronin explores the Sports Wearables space from a variety of perspectives, all viewed through the lens of Intellectual Property. Each perspective provides a variety of insights on the space and provides a glimpse of the future of the technology of Sports Wearables and the IP that protects it.
August, 2016
Adam Bulakowski, Principal Partner, is the author of "Valuation of Public Equities, Including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple: Capital Market Pricing of Opaque Intangible Assets". In this whitepaper, Adam connects market value to innovation-related growth potential, a practice that requires diligence beyond traditional analysis, particularly on knowledge intensive businesses.
June, 2016
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, is the author of "Creating Opportunities and Winning Back Your Losses From a Patent Litigation" (password protected). In this publication, Mr. Cronin discusses the many options available to a defendant after losing a patent case, including how ipCG's latest service offering can help. Contact us for a password to open the document.
May, 2016
"How To Innovate Without All That Costly R&D". Every business needs to innovate in order to thrive. But as corporate research and development grows ever more expensive, it's also becoming ever less effective. PriceWaterhouseCoopers reports that half of all companies say they are only "marginally effective" (i.e., bad) at converting R&D spending into actual products. Which explains why R&D is so often the target of activist investors. Continue this Forbes Leadership Article by John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman.
March, 2016
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, is the author of "Where's the Real Opportunity in Big Data?". In this whitepaper, based on a presentation Mr. Cronin gave at the Big Data Innovation Summit held January 28 & 29, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada, he outlines three big challenges in innovating and then owning the new Big Data products and services companies can develop for the marketplace.
January, 2016
Adam Bulakowski, Principal Partner, is the author of "The Future of Banking Profits: Innovation Decisions for Retail and Commercial Banks". In this whitepaper, Adam outlines the changing customer and competitor landscapes facing today's banking industry and argues that developing a thoughtful innovation strategy, considering changes with both customer needs and competition, is necessary to maintain profitability.
October, 2015
"How Driverless Cars Will Radically Change Every Aspect of Our Lives". Good driver discounts? Accident premium hikes? These are about to go extinct, along with a good portion of auto insurance profits. Because in just three years' time, driverless cars are going to start hitting the roads and reshaping a host of industries - not to mention all of our lives. But before we look at how, exactly, our lives will change, let's explore a curious feature of this radical innovation: it's coming primarily from outside the auto industry itself. Continue this Forbes Leadership Article by Marshall Phelps, Jr., former Deputy General Counsel of IP and Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corporation.
September, 2015
"Do Patents Really Promote Innovation? A Response To The Economist". Last month, the venerable Economist newspaper published an editorial decrying the state of the patent system. They rightly condemned the "parasitic ecology of trolls" that has bruised the patent system in recent years. But then the Economist went much further, claiming that while "today's patent regime operates in the name of progress, instead it sets innovation back." Continue this Forbes Leadership Article by Marshall Phelps, Jr., former Deputy General Counsel of IP and Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corporation.
August, 2015
"Can Big Tech Regain Its Innovation Mojo?". American technology companies once led the way in developing breakthrough products and services. But today many big tech firms seem to have lost their innovation mojo. Contuine this Forbes Leadership Article by Marshall Phelps, Jr., former Deputy General Counsel of IP and Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corporation.
May, 2015
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, and Peter Vanderheyden, President, Article One Partners, are the authors of "Crowd Searching Prior Art: Quality, Cost Savings and Improved Product Design Start with Crowd Search Invention Disclosure Prior Art Analysis". In this whitepaper, the authors address the fact that prior art is an issue that must be dealt with today more than in the past because of the ability to analyze global information databases. While it was easy to ignore data when it was difficult to access, the amount of accessible data has exploded. Avoiding it increases risk and cost while simultaneously reducing quality. Enter crowd searching.
September, 2014
In his Sept. 2014 Intellectual Property magazine article "Decoding patent valuation
," Adam J. Bulakowski, Director, provides a business perspective on valuing a patent portfolio - understanding the context, analyzing complex data, applying multiple approaches, and broadening the view of IP strategy beyond assertion-based ROI.
May, 2013
Bruce Story, Senior Advisor, discusses the impact of the AIA on the value of trade secrets in "America Invents Act shines the spotlight on trade secrets", written for IAM Magazine's May/June 2013 issue.
September, 2012
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, Nathan Doudera, Analyst, and John Callan of Ursa Major Associates are the authors of "Can Intellectual Property Save the USPS?" a white paper exploring how IP could be used to revivify the USPS, and the implications that bares for other players along the postal value chain. The paper was published by Post & Parcel on September 11, 2012.
July, 2012
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, and Nathan Doudera, Analyst, are the authors of "Is the Rental Car Industry Heading Toward Disruption Because of Intellectual Property?", an article outlining how recent increases in patents related to rental cars and mobile technology in particular, both within and outside of the industry, are cause for rental companies to embrace and prepare for IP's role in staying competitive. The article was written for Auto Rental News.
September, 2011
John Cronin, Managing Director and Chairman, and Marshall Phelps, ipCapital Group Board Member, are the authors of "Mining Patent Gold: What Every CEO Should Know", an article detailing recent large IP transactions and trends in the industry. The article, published in Forbes Magazine on September 9, 2011 can be found at the Forbes site.
September, 2011
Learn how to how to encourage joint creation in open innovation without losing IP rights in "Onwards and upwards", by ipCG Senior Manager, Kate Shore, published by Intellectual Property Magazine, September, 2011.
April, 2011
Rachael Schwartz, Senior Manager, details how communication of the value of IP accelerates business potential in her article, "Bridging the Information Gap", published by Intellectual Property Magazine, April, 2011.
March, 2011
Nancy Edwards Cronin, Principal Partner, weighs in with her expertise on the role of IP in various industry sectors and board rooms in "Taking it to the Top" an article by Rebecca Evans for the March, 2011 Issue of Intellectual Property Magazine.
February, 2011
Rachael Schwartz, Senior Manager, outlines the best approach to IP valuation in an acquisition in her article, "Considering intellectual property in acquisition pricing", published by Intellectual Property Magazine, February, 2011.
