Building an IP Strategy (1)
Markets and Opportunities
The unintentional entrepreneur:
- Jon Knights – fell into professional photography due to his friend asking him to take
pictures for his wedding
The intentional strategy:
- I started off playing in church, which led to playing jazz and being in the local bands around
Northants.
- Learning his craft originally as trumpeter studying at Birmingham Conservatoire, [Kieron
McIntosh] relocated to London now as a pianist and chose to then learn the craft of song
writing and producing.
- Having worked with Paloma Faith, Plan B, Laura Mvula, Kwabs, Chase and Status and
others, he continues to add unique perspective to the creative musical world and strive for
uniqueness and further commercial success.
- Kieron now runs a successful music production label House of El and continues to perform
internationally.
- https://www.viberating.co.uk/interviews/interview-with-house-of-el
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUrpwNq5LSI
The entrepreneurial and strategic benefits of IP:
- Legal Protection – protect your exclusive rights, protect against infringement
- Competitive Advantage – establish brand identity in the marketplace
- Revenue Generation – provide revenue streams and increase overall value
o Recognises entrepreneurial ideas
- Innovation & Creativity – protection encourages innovation to invest time and resources
into developing new ideas and products
- Strategic Partnerships – can help to ensure long term success and sustainability
Idea trapping:
- How should organisations generate ideas?
o Brainstorming (all ideas put to paper)
o Freewriting (Freewriting, a writing strategy developed by Peter Elbow in 1973, is
similar to brainstorming but is written in sentence and paragraph form without
stopping)
▪ Come up with an idea, and keep writing explaining your thoughts to create
your business plan
o Idea mapping (Maps and diagrams can immediately show us some of the
relationships between ideas and can spur further ideas in one direction without
confusing another)
- Must be processes for recognising innovations and should be established.
- https://www.pinterest.fr/pin/164803667590139448/
Searching for the opportunities:
- Value proposition: what the company offers the consumers altogether
- To create a value proposition, you need to clearly define your product or service and
showcase how you are different from competitors. This is often referred to as a Unique
Selling Point (USP).
o Why should a customer use your service or buy your product over a competitor’s?
o What are you offering that no one else can?
, o How can you serve the needs of each individual customer?
- A value proposition is not a positioning statement designed to appeal to as many
customers as possible, rather it’s very specific. To meet the specific needs of a specific
customer, you need to be as niche as possible.
- The Value Proposition is a key approach within Entrepreneurship theory.
- https://www.abtasty.com/blog/write-value-proposition/
Innovation: Addressing a problem:
- When we start thinking about the value proposition the first step is always to think about
the problem that we are solving. There are some great questions that you can ask as you
think about this.
o What is the pain?
o Who has the pain?
o How painful is it?
o How is it being solved now?
o How much will people pay to avoid it?
- Pain relievers, gain creators → relieve pain in return for gain for business
- What does the consumer believe the worth of the company is → what they believe they
should pay for it?
VP Patent example:
- VP = Value Proposition
- La Mauff (2021)
- The image presents a set of drugs and the
compound that treats ‘X’
- Left: patent is allowing for pain to be
released, allows tech to be produced to
provide offering for that drug to meet the
marketplace → when connecting patent and
technical effect = value proposition
- As patent provides legal protection for drug
to be developed, you can exploit your drug
in the specific ways to target consumers
exclusively
o This in turn leads to the value
proposition
Stage 1: The IP ideation process:
1) Commercial application
o Does the idea/concept have commercial application
2) Identifying IP assets
o Does the business have processes and/or procedures for identifying IP assets within
the business?
o IP audits, due diligences and utilising IP checklists
3) Capturing IP assets
o Does the business have processes and/or procedures for capturing IP assets?
o Relates to innovation capture – make sure organisation has everything to
understand how they can use the particular IP
4) Confidential information
o Does the business have processes and/or procedures for preventing disclosures of
the idea/concept?
o NDAs, trade secrets, restricted access, other agreements
Markets and Opportunities
The unintentional entrepreneur:
- Jon Knights – fell into professional photography due to his friend asking him to take
pictures for his wedding
The intentional strategy:
- I started off playing in church, which led to playing jazz and being in the local bands around
Northants.
- Learning his craft originally as trumpeter studying at Birmingham Conservatoire, [Kieron
McIntosh] relocated to London now as a pianist and chose to then learn the craft of song
writing and producing.
- Having worked with Paloma Faith, Plan B, Laura Mvula, Kwabs, Chase and Status and
others, he continues to add unique perspective to the creative musical world and strive for
uniqueness and further commercial success.
- Kieron now runs a successful music production label House of El and continues to perform
internationally.
- https://www.viberating.co.uk/interviews/interview-with-house-of-el
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUrpwNq5LSI
The entrepreneurial and strategic benefits of IP:
- Legal Protection – protect your exclusive rights, protect against infringement
- Competitive Advantage – establish brand identity in the marketplace
- Revenue Generation – provide revenue streams and increase overall value
o Recognises entrepreneurial ideas
- Innovation & Creativity – protection encourages innovation to invest time and resources
into developing new ideas and products
- Strategic Partnerships – can help to ensure long term success and sustainability
Idea trapping:
- How should organisations generate ideas?
o Brainstorming (all ideas put to paper)
o Freewriting (Freewriting, a writing strategy developed by Peter Elbow in 1973, is
similar to brainstorming but is written in sentence and paragraph form without
stopping)
▪ Come up with an idea, and keep writing explaining your thoughts to create
your business plan
o Idea mapping (Maps and diagrams can immediately show us some of the
relationships between ideas and can spur further ideas in one direction without
confusing another)
- Must be processes for recognising innovations and should be established.
- https://www.pinterest.fr/pin/164803667590139448/
Searching for the opportunities:
- Value proposition: what the company offers the consumers altogether
- To create a value proposition, you need to clearly define your product or service and
showcase how you are different from competitors. This is often referred to as a Unique
Selling Point (USP).
o Why should a customer use your service or buy your product over a competitor’s?
o What are you offering that no one else can?
, o How can you serve the needs of each individual customer?
- A value proposition is not a positioning statement designed to appeal to as many
customers as possible, rather it’s very specific. To meet the specific needs of a specific
customer, you need to be as niche as possible.
- The Value Proposition is a key approach within Entrepreneurship theory.
- https://www.abtasty.com/blog/write-value-proposition/
Innovation: Addressing a problem:
- When we start thinking about the value proposition the first step is always to think about
the problem that we are solving. There are some great questions that you can ask as you
think about this.
o What is the pain?
o Who has the pain?
o How painful is it?
o How is it being solved now?
o How much will people pay to avoid it?
- Pain relievers, gain creators → relieve pain in return for gain for business
- What does the consumer believe the worth of the company is → what they believe they
should pay for it?
VP Patent example:
- VP = Value Proposition
- La Mauff (2021)
- The image presents a set of drugs and the
compound that treats ‘X’
- Left: patent is allowing for pain to be
released, allows tech to be produced to
provide offering for that drug to meet the
marketplace → when connecting patent and
technical effect = value proposition
- As patent provides legal protection for drug
to be developed, you can exploit your drug
in the specific ways to target consumers
exclusively
o This in turn leads to the value
proposition
Stage 1: The IP ideation process:
1) Commercial application
o Does the idea/concept have commercial application
2) Identifying IP assets
o Does the business have processes and/or procedures for identifying IP assets within
the business?
o IP audits, due diligences and utilising IP checklists
3) Capturing IP assets
o Does the business have processes and/or procedures for capturing IP assets?
o Relates to innovation capture – make sure organisation has everything to
understand how they can use the particular IP
4) Confidential information
o Does the business have processes and/or procedures for preventing disclosures of
the idea/concept?
o NDAs, trade secrets, restricted access, other agreements
