IP, Globalization and the Future of Supply Chains: A Conversation with Sonja London | IPWatchdog Unleashed

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, we speak with Sonja London. Sonia has been general counsel at TactoTek and before that spent 14 years working for Nokia, where she oversaw Nokia’s consumer electronics licensing, global licensing program for connectivity and video codecs, and was responsible for standardization. Sonja has spent the last year as President of Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), and her time in that role is winding down as LESI’s annual meeting in Singapore approaches at the end of April. Our conversation, which took place April 8, 2025, focuses on intellectual property, globalization, supply chains, licensing and more.

We start our conversation talking about London’s experiences over the last year—the good, the bad and the ugly. “There’s no ugly and no bad,” London said with a chuckle.

As London was discussing her approach to running LESI, she explained that the goal of the organization is to bring the community together for the purpose of “advancing the commercialization of intellectual assets… not property only, but assets, to bring creativity and innovation to the market, improving lives everywhere.” This provoked me to ask, so we were all on the same page, about the distinction she was drawing between assets and property, which led us into a conversation about the importance of trade secrets and know how.

I shared with her one of the things that has boggled my mind is hearing from companies that resist identifying and cataloguing trade secrets out of fear that they might miss something, so instead they leave everything unidentified. “[T]that lack of sophistication has shocked me a little bit,” I said.  “I wonder… is it getting more sophisticated or do you think people still have a lot of misconceptions?”

“I think both,” she said. “It’s a little bit difficult subject. It depends on what you have. Sometimes it’s clear. You have a formula of something that you want to keep secret. So, then you protect it adequately… Then you might have other combinations, especially in technology…[Y]ou need to know and identify. But I understand that if you make a list of all of the secret things that you have, how long that list will be secret. So, you are kind of then creating a risk for your trade secrets to be leaking or misappropriated.”

We move on to discuss culture, and lesson London learned as she has visited more than a dozen countries in her time as President of LESI over the last year. We discussed technology generally, and specifically within the automotive sector and how we are starting to see even the automotive sector new companies challenge the long-time incumbent players by rethinking the technology from the ground up. This led a conversation about agile development of technologies. And then we inevitably found our way to the most pressing business issue of the moment, the likely reordering of global trade and shifting supply chains, which very refreshingly we discussed in an apolitical, thoughtful way were we both expressed hope for the future, whatever that is going to look like.

“Are we at a pivot moment?” I asked.

“I think we are in a moment where everybody’s kind of trying to see where it goes,” London said. “IP has been a collaborative effort, and the business is global. Global business is good for IP and good for business. Global IP is good for business and vice versa. So now it seems to me that the era of globalization and kind of meaning producing things in the places where it makes sense, and where it’s economically most viable, and so on, and then import and exporting, the whole system is now in some kind of a mode of recalibration. And I hope that there will be collaborative resolutions for whatever questions we have, because that’s good for the business. And that’s good for everybody.”

Our conversation weaved in and out of what is happening the moment, to lessons from the past, with both of us discussing lessons learned regarding agile development and businesses pivoting at a moment of existential thread during World War II. We also discussed the breakdown in supply chains during COVID, which caused great business disruption as the weak link in the supply chain inflicted delay and lost commerce. We discuss TRIPS and looking at the current global trade issues as an opportunity, even if it isn’t readily apparent what that opportunity is at the moment or who will have been able to seize it when we look back with the perspective of months, years or decades.

“It may be that the more turbulent global situation will impact supply chains so that they just will become more expensive,” London said. “But on the other hand, more expensive may mean also jobs and whatnot closer to the players. Who knows? We don’t know who’s the winner and who’s the loser. We don’t know that yet.”

If global business, current affairs and intellectual property are of interest to you I strongly recommend you listen to my conversation with Sonja London. You can listen to the podcast wherever you normally access podcasts, or visit IPWatchdog Unleashed on Buzzsprout.

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