Intellectual Property Management for Technology Professionals

Every company has well designed systems for managing its assets, from human resources to financial resources to inventory to facilities. Yet, the strategic management of intellectual property is often inadequate. Every technology professional knows that intellectual property represent key assets of a technology company, but few are sophisticated in managing these assets. Lawyers tend to provide the operational management with little or no input from strategic management. Senior management tends to ask more questions than offer direction. Books on intellectual property management are mostly written by attorneys and focus on providing explanations of the categories of intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets). Little is offered on how these categories fit into a company's strategic goals. This is tantamount to learning everything there is to know about bricks but learning nothing about architecture. Mr. Wyatt provides a six chapter primer to empower technology professionals to use a system for managing the strategic intellectual property needs of a technology company. The system is based upon three primary models for applying intellectual property to a company's strategic goals. Following this system ensures that the company management knows (1) how the company's intellectual property is being applied, (2) that the intellectual property is being applied correctly and (3) that expenditures are appropriate and effective. This primer provides the concepts and tools necessary for a technology professional to understand the nature of intellectual property and methods to capture the state of a company's intellectual property development. This supports a dashboard display of the current state of the company's intellectual property. With this perspective, a technology professional can design future actions to better align the company's intellectual property to its strategic goals. This book is designed for scientists, engineers, managers, lawyers and investors, or anyone studying to work in these fields.