Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization's intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In this book, intellectual property expert and Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey offers a short briefing on intellectual property strategy for corporate managers and nonprofit administrators. Palfrey argues for strategies that go beyond the traditional highly restrictive "sword and shield" approach, suggesting that flexibility and creativity are essential to a profitable long-term intellectual property strategy--especially in an era of changing attitudes about media. Intellectual property, writes Palfrey, should be considered a key strategic asset class. Almost every organization has an intellectual property portfolio of some value and therefore the need for an intellectual property strategy. A brand, for example, is an important form of intellectual property, as is any information managed and produced by an organization. Palfrey identifies the essential areas of intellectual property--patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret--and describes strategic approaches to each in a variety of organizational contexts, based on four basic steps. The most innovative organizations employ multiple intellectual property approaches, depending on the situation, asking hard, context-specific questions. By doing so, they achieve both short- and long-term benefits while positioning themselves for success in the global information economy.
I spend most of my professional time as Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. I am also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. My research and teaching focus primarily on Internet law, intellectual property, and the potential of new technologies to strengthen democracies locally and around the world.
I'm very interested in writing about the way that people use emerging technologies in innovative ways. We are living in an exciting time. It's also a time of great complexity. There's much to explore and to seek to understand. And it seems unlikely, in an exciting way, that anyone will be able to predict the impact that the use of these new technologies will have on institutions and societies at large over the course of the next few decades.
