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Who owns Intellectual Property

 

IET Magazine - July 2010

Whether it is patents, trademarks, copyrights, R&D or other forms of intellectual property, as a manufacturer your IP is what makes others want to do business with you, and it should be respected, valued and protected accordingly, says E&T.

Launched aboard an Atlas V rocket on 11 February, Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory space probe is on a five-year mission to study the Sun. Already, the spacecraft has sent back some stunning images, as well as beaming a continuous stream of digital data to Nasa's Goddard Space Centre.

Yet, at first glance, Nasa's newest space probe has little in common with one of the agency's oldest still-operational spacecraft - the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and recently upgraded and repaired by a Space Shuttle crew in May 2009.

But Hubble, too, is renowned for sending home stunning photographs - and those images form the link between the two missions.

It turns out that E2V Technologies, which has its headquarters in Chelmsford, Essex, built the imaging devices on Hubble, the Solar Dynamics Observatory and other space probes launched by Nasa and the European Space Agency into Earth orbit as well as to Mars and Venus.

'Nasa tells us that no one in the US can match our performance and capabilities, which is why they come to us,' says Trevor Cross, E2V's chief technology officer.

But underpinning that performance, says Cross, is a compilation of carefully husbanded pieces of intellectual property (IP), built up over years of R&D and successive generations of products.

'We describe ourselves as a high-tech company, which means that we have to think IP and how we manage, protect and exploit that,' he says. 'We spend around 1-1.5 per cent of our sales turnover on IP protection, and take out between 180-200 patents each year.'

Yet arguably, in its approach to IP, E2V is very much the exception and not the rule - in the UK, at least.

'A lot of companies don't really think about where the value is in their business,' notes Jackie Maguire, chief executive of London-based IP experts Coller IP Management. 'They intuitively know what is important to the business going forward, but don't always appreciate where it is coming from. And because of that, they don't understand what protection needs to be in place to keep that value safe.' more >