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On World Intellectual Property Day, who can predict what will happen with the value of intellectual property in the future. Will it still be the same in 2025, will it be seen as an irrelevance or will everything be crowd-sourced, socially-owned and open sourced? As a publisher Gower has a vested interest in what will happen and, with the caveat that my views are coloured by my position, let me offer three observations …
Paid for content versus everything for free
Free stuff is always welcome but without question, you do get what you pay for, and innovation, creativity and new content all have a cost. Personally, I think that, while new models will continue to emerge (who could have imagined the mobile apps model 10 years ago!), the need for curation of content and information will mean that customers will still be willing to pay. In a world where digital content is exploding, the value of rigorous, consistent and well signposted content is surely very significant;
New shared models
Crowdsourcing is attracting a lot of attention, but there are other more mainstream opportunities for businesses to create and innovate that don’t involve the mass market. Collaborative business is on the rise and with it comes a need and an aspiration for organizations to share risk and, consequently, share reward. That must point towards some new models that enable practical shared ownership of IP rights between different organizations, companies, governments and NGOs.
A collaborative approach to publishing
I am very proud of the fact that Gower has always worked with our authors and editors on the basis of licensed rights. We have never insisted that authors assign their copyright as part of a publishing agreement nor have we sought to bind them to us with restrictive arrangements for their future books. We are already developing new collaborative models for publishing in the future – models that enable us to contribute and profit from those aspects of a work’s intellectual property where we can add value through editing, distribution and marketing, whilst at the same time, enabling authors to exploit their own IP in directions and media that are outside our (realistic) reach.
A handful of Gower and Ashgate titles on intellectual property:
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez’ article in PM World Journal is a fascinating insight into why senior managers tend to ignore project management. I won’t steal his thunder – read the article, it is an interesting perspective; whilst it may feel somewhat depressing I think there is plenty of evidence that things are changing. Antonio is author of The Focused Organization: How Concentrating on a Few Key Initiatives Can Dramatically Improve Strategy Execution.
I really enjoyed Douglas Board’s interview with Bob Garlick on the recent Business Book Talk. It’s extraordinarily demoralising, when we are all struggling to create a new future in an uncertain business world, to see those selected and paid to lead us so often seem to have feet of clay. Douglas’ insights into executive selection offer some pragmatic ways of changing by understanding and embracing the uncertainty and complexity it involves. If we adopt the kind of approaches he is advocating in the place of the old, self-perpetuating ones, I wonder to what extent this would change both the quality of our leaders and the culture of leadership which they enable? Douglas Board is author of Choosing Leaders and Choosing to Lead: Science, Politics and Intuition in Executive Selection.
Jane Sparrow’s interview with Bob Garlick in the recent Business Book Talk is a wonderful example of leading by example. If you just listen to how Jane talks about her approach to leading employees, you get an immediate sense of the quality and common sense she distills in her book The Culture Builders. Her focus on the importance of middle managers in making things happen may not be radically new but the pragmatism that she brings to the process of mobilizing them is immediately convincing. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy – particularly with the five distinctive roles that she outlines for middle managers (prophet, storyteller, strategist, coach, pilot) – but then, just maybe there are middle managers out there who are looking for the opportunity to step up to a challenge; to make a difference to their organization and not spend their whole time simply as the bulldogs of business-as-usual.
Gordon Pearson’s interview with Bob Garlick on Business Book Talk is a revelation. Gordon’s one of those academic authors who can talk about issues at a level of global economic theory in a way that gives you a real sense of what the driving forces are in the background behind operational businesses. His ideas on cooperation-based businesses really deserve to be picked up at a policymaker level but in the meantime, it’s open for you and I to explore and aspire to a post-crisis world that is robust and sustainable, rather than lurching from one mess to another. Gordon Pearson is author of The Road to Co-operation and The Rise and Fall of Management.
There is a huge amount that business leaders can learn from the military experience; the trouble is that in many cases, the lessons require translation. Bob Garlick’s interview in Business Book Talk with Nicholas Beale (Strategy Consultant) and David Ellery (Foreign Office) really opens up the oppportunity for business leaders to learn from the military and vice-versa. Some readers and listeners may view this confluence of business and battle as evidence of the increasing commercialisation of war but I don’t think this points to that at all; rather it’s the first, rather successful attempt, to distill pragmatic and universal leadership lessons in a langauge that makes them relevant to all. Vice-Admiral Charles Style, Nicholas Beale and David Ellery are the co-editors of In Business and Battle: Strategic Leadership in the Civilian and Military Spheres.
Sometimes we can overlook the simplest of questions because we become mesmerised by the scale or complexity of a particular issue; the energy industry is a case in point. Steven Fawkes’ article ‘Electricity Market Reform and the Demand Side’ offers a perspective on the dangers of a government focusing on one side of the equation (supply or demand) that is easy to grasp and hugely important, whether you are in the industry, an investor or just a UK citizen. Stephen Fawkes is author of Outsourcing Energy Management(2007) and Energy Efficiency: A Definitive Guide to the Fastest, Cheapest, Cleanest Forms of Energy (2013)
The 2012 IPMA Congress made a big thing of sustainability this year, which is very encouraging. The presentations, some of which will be available in the near future on SCOPUS, covered research results and case studies as well as tools and methods, all of which aligned to demonstrate the need, benefits, and practical nature of integrating sustainable methods with project delivery from a social, economic, environmental, process and product/service perspective. They are promising an expanded sustainability stream for 2013 in Dubrovnik. Gower authors, Gilbert Silvius and Ron Schipper (authors of Sustainability in Project Management) were amongst the presenters at this year’s event.
I try to avoid falling to the trap of drawing unsubstantiated conclusions from research. That said, the first thing that leapt out at me when I read Sociagility’s ‘Social Media and the City: The FTSE 100 Social Performance Index 2012′ was that of the 2/3rds of large companies whose social performance index was below that of their peers, many of them either seemed uninterested in social media, had a weak social media strategy or were simply unconcerned with direct external public communications. The 38 page research report is available to download from the Sociagility website. Niall Cook, one of the reports’ co-authors is also author of Gower Publishing’s Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work and the, forthcoming, The Social CEO: Why Business Leaders Should Make Time for Social Media.
Stakeholder communication may be a very urgent requirement for every project but Ann Pilkington’s article in Simply Communicate shows why it’s well worth taking a moment to reflect on the resources you have to hand, before you start the communication process. Have you reviewed the project documentation - how it has been structured and what it contains should be fundamental to your approach to communication; have you talked to the right people, asked the right questions and do you understand the context behind the project? I found this article really refreshing because it provides such intuitive lessons for anyone trying to work out the basis for their communication plan … it’s all there, if you take the time to look for it! Ann Pilkington is author of the forthcoming Gower book Communicating Projects.
