Posts in Business

The LES Foundation International Business Plan Competition, now in its 13th year, focuses uniquely on the intellectual property (IP) aspects of business strategy. For the first 11 years, the Competition was open only to Graduate Students, but as of 18 months ago, it was opened to any start-up company, including reorganizations, with less than $200,000 of equity investment funding over its history. And the 2016-2017 International Business Plan Competition Winners are…

Mark Lopreiato, the inventor of the Forearm Forklift, recorded sales of $4 million in 2008 but since then has seen a 30% drop, which he attributes to cheap replicas available on eBay and Amazon. In point of fact, there have been a number of examples of innovative companies suffering from the sale of replicas on Amazon and other e-commerce sites. In extreme cases, global brands like Birkenstock have stopped business with Amazon and other e-commerce retailers altogether. Sustained pressure on e-commerce sites from both professional and governmental bodies have yielded some results in recent years, with almost every major site now offering some level of IP protection tool or process. This also serves the interest of bigger sites as Amazon, eBay and their Chinese counterpart Alibaba are shielded from legal liability, provided they can offer a timely takedown service for IP owners.

Bob Stoll: ”And it is the international exhaustion holding that is particularly troubling. Sales abroad act independently from the US patent system and there is no impact from the US patent system on those sales. Yet in this decision, the Supreme Court says that the foreign sale now diminishes patent rights in the US. All sorts of goods, including life-saving pharmaceuticals, are sold at lower prices in poor nations. This decision will encourage powerful foreign groups to gather products up and send them back to the US to get the higher prices. Or, companies will not be able to lower prices and sell their products in those countries. Both the poor in distant lands and the innovators in the US will suffer.”

When it comes to making strategic patent portfolio decisions, it is more important than ever to be informed, thorough and discriminating with your decision-making. In short, the number of strategic decisions available to those obtaining and maintaining a portfolio are greater than ever and, in fact, have only continued to explode in number. So many strategic decisions to consider throughout the innovation lifecycle, where should you start? Join me, Carlo Cotrone (GE Oil & Gas) and Edmund White (CPA Global) for a free webinar on Thursday, June 1 at 2PM ET.

An unfounded belief persists that entrepreneurs are the primary innovators. However, in a study of the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years up through 2009, as judged by Wharton professors, shows innovations that most affected society were conceived by company workers, not entrepreneurs, according to Dr. Kaihan Krippendorff, a Wharton alum and self-described study author… So in order to encourage innovation, these characteristics of employee-innovators should be developed early on, according to Krippendorff. Logically, not only would that increase the level of innovation but also ease the task of innovation management.

At the same time that America’s business climate has become too acidic for a vast majority of domestic startups, the nation has also been losing its place in the global supply chain while other major global economies, like China’s, are becoming increasingly self-reliant… This report identifies trending emerging tech like virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, smart robots, gesture control devices, smart data discovery and virtual personal assistants, as well as consumer expectation levels and the length of time until the emerging tech becomes fully commercializable. As Aronoff noted, much of the innovation in those sectors relies on software. “Is that even protectable anymore?” Aronoff asked… With the new patent enforcement gauntlet in the U.S., what does it really take for a small company to protect its IP in the current system?

The latest estimate from the International Trademark Association (INTA) notes the global impact of piracy and counterfeiting will hit $4.2 trillion (USD) by 2022… While buying a “knockoff” product may not seem to present harm on the surface, a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warns that purchasing counterfeit or pirated goods present “a significant economic threat that undermines innovation and hampers economic growth.” … Fire, electric shock, injury and, at times, fatalities are just some of the risks in using a counterfeit product. Within the past few years, several highly publicized electrocution deaths have been linked to counterfeit iPhone adapters.

One of the most egregious reasons that states make non-compete agreements (NCAs) unenforceable remains the broadness of the agreements that for all practical purposes bans an individual from pursuing her profession of choice. For example, enforceable NCAs cannot have language that calls for a separated employee to have to sit out her chosen industry for an excessive time, according to legal professionals. And NCAs must remain rational and have a rationale. “Most states will enforce restrictive covenants like NCAs so long as such agreements are reasonable in time, area and line of business,” says Micah J. Longo, employment lawyer, The Longo Firm, P.A.

in hyper growth startups and other companies that rely on knowledge workers, the agenda for these value makers must remain as clear as possible. However, sometimes intellectual property (IP) creators inside companies get bogged down and cannot concentrate on the next breakthrough due to redtape. Bottom line: a corporate policy day of reckoning remains overdue… “I have observed large multinational corporations that did not have extensive policies and processes, and their workers were entrepreneurial and empowered,” says Cary A. Levitt, chief operating officer, Dennemeyer & Co., LLC, a worldwide partner in IP management with both legal and portfolio services. “They were trusted to use their judgment to make decisions. When the business environment became more competitive, the company implemented detailed decision-making processes. Each decision had to be vetted by one or more panels. Bigger the decision, deeper the assessment, longer the timeline.”

Most CEOs won’t make a move without first consulting their general counsel or other legal adviser. But the general counsel seldom rises to the CEO spot. Why is that? Many corporate counsels work in large companies where each department—including legal—has very specific responsibilities and boundaries. Therefore, it’s harder for attorneys to get involved with key business, non-legal, initiatives that could demonstrate C-level potential. But the path from general counsel to CEO is becoming a lot more common.

While all economic views of productivity growth may have a grain of truth, I argue that all of these theories of productivity growth are fundamentally wrong. The economic evidence shows clear relationships between the trend of decline in productivity growth and the trend in declines of the U.S. patent system. As the patent system has been weakened in the last decade, there is less investment by start-ups in technology R&D. At the same time, the technology industry has become highly concentrated, with big tech incumbents dominating their industries. The combination of increasingly concentrated competitive configurations in the technology industry with the reduction in key rights embedded in patents, has resulted in substantially reduced incentives to invest in R&D innovations.

The market for recreational vehicles in America has been doing pretty well in recent years. A 2011 study sponsored by the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) pegs the number of households which own an RV at 8.9 million, a new high figure for RV ownership which is a full one million more households than was found in a 2005 study. The average age of ownership dropped by a year to 48 years with owners having a median income of $62,000. The strongest ownership growth was seen in the age range of 35 years to 54 years. RVIA shipping statistics for the first four months of 2015 show that RV shipments during the first quarter of that year reached more than 135,000 units among travel trailers, campers, motorhomes and towable RVs.

The Internet retail juggernaut that is Amazon.com continues to get stronger and it’s doing so in a way that should worry other players in the consumer electronics sector. In late June, a Deutsche Bank analyst note was issued pointing out the magnitude of Amazon’s increased dominance of consumer electronics. In 2015 there was an increase of $5.6 billion in the consumer electronics sector and Amazon was responsible for $5.1 billion of that increase. That corresponds to a 90 percent share of the 2015 increase in the consumer electronics sector. Deutsche Bank’s Mike Baker also noted that Amazon now commands a 17 percent share of the consumer electronics market, which puts them in second-place behind only Best Buy

On June 13th, the Redmond, WA-based multinational tech company Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced that it had agree to acquire LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) in a $26.2 billion cash transaction which values LinkedIn stock at $196 per share. According to news reports, this is Microsoft’s largest corporate acquisition ever. It greatly outpaces the company’s $8.5 billion Skype acquisition and the $7.6 Nokia purchase, both of which happened prior to the tenure of current CEO Satya Nadella. With Microsoft’s acquiring LinkedIn at such a high premium, there has been talks that mergers and acquisitions may increase in the social network sector.