Thomas L. Friedman reminded us that “Invent, Invent, Invent” is the mantra to get us out of economic downturn. A surprising number of great companies, like General Electric, IBM, Kraft, McDonald’s, Walt Disney and Electronic Arts were formed in years that featured a recession, as did Motorola, HP,  Xerox, Unisys, Texas Instruments and Revlon.  The recession of the early 1990s hit much of the world. The rapid recovery from the recession and the growth of industrial output in Finland has been very much explained by...

Tomorrow, Monday April 26, is World Intellectual Property Day. Initiated by WIPO in 2000, the 10th anniversary of this day coincides with the 40th anniversary of the entry into force of the Convention establishing WIPO (the WIPO Convention).  There are currently 184 Member States, i.e. over 90 percent of the countries of the world. Many countries and WIPO members organize special events for this day, countries with an active IPR policy but also countries one would not imagine to pay much attention to IP, like Moldova or Saudi...

The World Intellectual Property Organization  (WIPO) in Geneva published its “World Intellectual Property Indicators 2009”. It provides – among others – statistics on how many patent applications have been filed via WIPO’s PCT. The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international treaty, administered by WIPO. The PCT makes it possible to seek patent protection for an invention simultaneously in a large number of countries by filing a single “international” patent application at WIPO. …

“Invent, Invent, Invent” is today’s op-ed column of Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. Can’t be more true. Monday Note gives an interesting overview of the inventions made during recession times: 1975, in the middle of a recession, The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) introduces the Alto, a computer featuring the first graphic user interface with windows, menus, and mouse. Four years later, Steve Jobs tours Xerox PARC and “inhales” the features we later saw into the Lisa and the Macintosh (other examples,...

The McKinsey Quarterly published an interesting read, “Memo to the CEO: Why we need an annual report for technology1 The idea is for a technology rich company to issue an annual report for technology analogous to the annual report for investors and the broader market. A take from the article: The annual report would provide an overview of the company’s ability to extract business value from technology but also substantiate that analysis with hard metrics, giving perspectives on the challenges of technology, …

Sadly, the IP community has for long failed to go out telling the non-IP world – not least the top management of companies and governments alike – in simple, understandable terms what crucial role IP plays and how underestimated its potential in international trade and economic growth is. And how we must change this. Here is an example. Technology development and technology transfer between the “have’s” and the “have-not’s” are key in obtaining global economic growth in …

In November 2008 the European Commission published its Preliminary Report on it’s “Pharmaceutical Sector Inquiry”. Some of the conclusions are pretty harsh and can hardly be seen as friendly towards the pharmaceutical industry: “The preliminary findings of the inquiry also suggest that originator companies develop and practice defensive patenting strategies primarily in order to block the development of new competing products.” Although it is not the intention to seek to identify wrongdoing by individual...

The European Research Area (ERA) was created at the EU Council, held in Lisbon in 2000 in the context of the Lisbon Strategy, also known as the Lisbon Agenda or Lisbon Process. It’s aim is (or, better, was) to make the EU “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010″. What have become of these ambitions? Europe’s knowledge based economies still lag behind...

The conclusions from the Booz Allen Hamilton study – as mentioned in yesterday’s post on this blog (“R&D spending doess not necessarlity increase profits”) are quite in line with the points I make in public events. However, the Booz Allen study is often being misquoted, and one needs also to understand the context in which the DTI study is being prepared. The BA study does demonstrate that companies need to manage their investment on R&D as part of an overall effective innovation process. So...

Companies spend billions of dollars on R&D to boost innovation output in the expectation of increasing profitability. From a study publised today by Booz Allen Hamilton, “Smart Spenders: The Global Innovation 1000“, it appears that it is not as easy as that: R&D spending does not necessarily increase profits. Booz Allen Hamilton’s annual study of the world’s 1,000 largest corporate R&D budgets uncovers a small group of high-leverage innovators who outperform their industries. Financial Times, claims it undermines...