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Setting the Standards in IP

Electronic Design Magazine April 2010

 

Many communications and electronics companies have talented employees who come up with radical inventions. Yet for a number of reasons, these organizations fail to protect and commercialize those designs and inventions. In addition, many companies don’t know how to value their intellectual property (IP).

IP is part of intellectual capital, which includes workforce skills, business processes, customer and business relationships, branding, reputation, and the know-how of employees. All of these factors are required in today’s world of commerce. On its own, IP can be a potential liability if it leads to inventorship disputes or expensive patent litigation. Ideas and inventions provide a company’s heartbeat, but the wider intellectual capital (see the figure) drives growth and sustainability.

For electronics companies, IP plays an important role in the standards arena. Many companies may not realize how vulnerable they may be. Prior to attending standards meetings or to publishing in journals or conference papers, organizations need to understand that they should take advice about when they should patent their inventions and how they should go about it.

Standards meetings comprise R&D personnel from various organizations. For example, telcos may contribute to the development of standards to ensure that their technology is incorporated into those standards. For each standard or proposed standard, there are numerous standards meetings—often as many as five or six per year. The 3GPP wireless standard requires hundreds of meetings per year.

At these meetings, R&D personnel present their recommendations as to how the standard should evolve. Everyone essentially votes or decides on each presentation. If the presenters are “lucky,” the organization will include some if not all of their recommendations into the standard. These recommendations will relate to an organization’s technology and hence to possible patentable inventions.

However, R&D personnel need to be aware of what disclosing their recommendations means to the portion of their company’s patent portfolio that is related to the standard. These meetings inadvertently can be very damaging to the portfolio and hence to their competitiveness. more >