Customer Reviews

Making Innovation Pay: People Who Turn IP Into Shareholder Value

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I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and found it extremely useful. It's an engaging compilation of 11 chapters written by 11 Intellectual Property experts, all of which are focused on how innovation brings shareholder value. By reading this book, a person is able to quickly understand the Intellectual Property playing field as it is today, and to identify many of the main actors and their differing viewpoints. Whether a person is an inventor, attorney, CFO or just interested in today's Intellectual Property environment, I think this book is a must-read. It is current, informative and well-written. Bruce Berman does an excellent job of giving the reader concise and valuable information.

I read this book this past week and from my knowledge of the marketplace it seems to have held up remarkably well.

I found many of the articles extremely informative and very accessible for someone without a heavy background in Intellectual Property (IP). My background is in public relations and investor relations so I was grateful to have a guide to the IP world that cut through many of the standard legalistic terminology (that plagues many of these books) and cut to the heart of the realistic value of IP.

I came upon this book while doing research on IP for a client and it provided me not only with some good facts and arguments on the value of IP (the main focus of my research) but also gave me overall point of view that succinctly summed up the different areas where IP draws its value.

The knowledge contained in this book is well worth the price and a must-read for anyone interested or (required to know!) the value of IP.

Most of the business world focuses on the competition that occurs between products already on the market. A whole other world of competition takes place in the background involving intellectual property that a select few in business understand well. Bruce Berman has collected essays from an exemplary set of people who do understand intellectual property and have the track records to prove it. The book covers a lot of ground, which is the only issue this reader had with the material. Each of the individuals featured here could probably write his own book. The collection of possibilities to explore from an informed standpoint, however, is excellent; and in a field that is emerging from traditional ways of handling intellectual property, it pays to hear ideas from a number of voices.

The first 50 pages are worth the cost of a seminar

As a 37 year patent practitioner, I found the first 50 pages of this book to be an eye-opener. It not only is worth the cost of the book, but in my view is worth the entire cost of the seminar for which it was offered as a preliminary read.

Whether or not the figures are exacting, the dichotomy is striking between the potential value of an IP portfolio on the one hand and the proportionately smaller amount of C-level executive and Director time devoted to management of the asset. It is also worrisome for all those managers to whom management responsibility is entrusted.

For those stuck in the traditional notion of exclusion being the principle basis for valuation of an IP portfolio, the implications of ignoring other and more non-traditional forms of value, coupled with the possibility of being called to account for that non-imaginative and perhaps negligent approach, are too important to overlook. Failure to effectively manage an IP asset may generate potentially serious liability for responsible executives and directors.

A well-done call to possibility is never wasted. While not a "how to", this book delivers that wake up call concisely and effectively. It is a call to action for the assembly of financial, legal and strategic thinking and resources in the management of IP, to be particularly heeded by the caretakers and enhancers of value.

Management of patent portfolios is moving on to new innovative approaches and business models.Bruce Berman has assembled a group of people who are on the leading edge of developing and making use of these new approaches and models.This is an interesting read for business people and also for university people involved in technology transfer.It is well worth the few evenings it takes to read the book.

This volume is disappointingly lightweight. Notwithstanding the comment of another reviewer who allegedly spent several evenings reading it, one can easily read it in 2 hours or even much less. The pages have relatively few lines of text, and those lines are widely-spaced. Almost 30% of the book (55.5 pages out of 190, other than intro and index) is filler, comprising biographies repelete with photos of the chapter authors in their Formula 1 racecars, running in a triathlon, rubbing their dog's belly, etc., and lots of information about their hobbies, or else pages that are completely blank but for brief epigrams by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Herman Melville.

The substantive focus is almost exclusively on patents, with a dash of trade secrets thrown in. On the plus side, writers from IBM, HP and Intel have good stuff to say about licensing strategies. But the book doesn't say much about the strategic side of building a portfolio -- e.g., you won't find any mention of designing around, the doctrine of equivalents, walls, fences or flooding. Many of the articles exalt the delights of suing people. The authors voice opposing views about patent trolls, but the discussion is surprisingly black and white, with little nuance (e.g., no discussion about whether there should be different remedies for different sorts of patent owners).

A frequent refrain throughout the book is that up to 80% of many companies' value is in IP and intangible rights. But actually, good luck trying to get 80% of your market cap by selling off your IP portfolio. In the context of this book, the statistic is misleading in several respects. First, the percentage is based on the gap between the market capitalization of a company and the book value of its tangible assets. Much of the value in this gap is in goodwill and brand, i.e. trademarks and related rights, which aren't discussed in this book at all. Second, the debate over whether market cap accurately reflects fundamental value would fill many books the length of this one. Lastly, the valuation of patents is especially context-dependent. A patent's value can only be determined by licensing or selling it to someone else, or by using it in litigation. For most companies (trolls aside), only a small percentage of their patents will ever be litigated. It's hard to predict which ones those will be, and even harder to predict the financial outcome of the case. And the percentage that are licensed is usually well under a majority (and in many cases is zero). All these issues complicate the attribution of value to patents. But aside from some brief discussions of patent quality in one or two chapters, you won't find such issues grappled with in this book.

The three or four best articles, such as the one by M. Phelps about IBM's licensing program, are way too short and general to give you much guidance on how to implement a strategy at your company. They're like tantalizing hors d'oeuvres -- whereas the book is priced like a full meal (or a very fancy entree, at least). As for the balance, there are plenty of websites and blogs where you can get articles of comparable depth and insight for free. So buy this book used, or read it in a store. A meatier book about patents generally, including portfolio strategy, is Knight's "Patent Strategy for Researchers and Research Managers"; and about licensing programs, a pretty good choice is Parr and Sullivan's "Technology Licensing: Corporate Strategies for Maximizing Value." You may spend more on those, but they're much better value for the price.