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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:
Philip Weiss’ presentation at a recent event in Brussels picks up a theme that has been around for a number of years but, one that I still think organizations have difficulty accommodating; even thought it is pretty much basic common sense. Innovation involves trial and error and innovation in the context of accelerating speeds of change involves plenty of opportunities for geting it wrong. Every organization needs to work out the dimensions of their own particular tightrope: play it too safe and you’re soon out of the game; overcomplicate the whole process or fail to learn from your failures and it’s also ‘game over’. Philip is author of the forthcoming book Hyperthinking: Creating a New Mindset for the Age of Networks.
Is innovation always good? Let’s look at one example. A financial innovation, Collateralized Debt Obligations (“CDO”)….read more at: http://thefutureofinnovation.org/contributions/view/549/the_future_of_innovation_is_innovation_always_good
Complementary to our book The Future of Innovation is a website with a community of over 350 leading thinkers from business, government, consulting and academia around the globe, you will find additional information and articles on this site discussing innovation from all angles. For example the short article above from Dr Karl-Erik Sveiby, Hanken School Of Economics. Do feel free to browse the site and read more thought provoking pieces.
In a lecture on Innovation in Belgium last week, Gijs van Wulfen put together a 66-point innovation checklist that summarised the benefits of his FORTH method which connects creativity and business reality in five steps: Full Steam Ahead, Observe and Learn, Raise Ideas, Test Ideas and Homecoming. His checklist can be found here.
Gijs book, Creating Innovative Products and Services: The FORTH Innovation Method is out now.
Patent laws have no application or force outside the country in which they are enacted so it is important to determine in which jurisdictions you should obtain patent protection, and on what basis you should make such decisions.
Donal O’Connell has written a paper on this subject called International or foreign patent filing strategic considerations and can be found in the following places:
The Faculty of Engineering at the National University of Singapore and
Practice source, a website for Australian and Asian legal news
Donal has also recently presented a talk on Open Innovation: The Challenges and Solutions, it was recorded at a British Library event in London and can be viewed here: http://youtu.be/RfkTpU8K2BU
Donal is the author of Harvesting External Innovation
Generating and developing innovative ideas is a difficult process. How do you confidently kick-start the ideation phase of any innovative process to create new ideas and concepts effortlessly and without pulling your hair out? Gijs van Wulfen, author of Gower’s Creating Innovative Products and Services, has put together 20 step by step tips to guide you to ideation excellence.
Glenn Remoreras’ blog piece ‘Paralysis of Analysis’ makes some great points about the culture needed for successful innovation. He offers what others might call a ‘three bears’ approach to analysis … ‘not too much, or too little, but just the right amount’ for fast, informed decision-making. Glenn Remoreras is the author of the forthcoming Gower book: Building a Brand for IT.
“Innovation is not a process, but an outcome.”
The Forbes Leadership Forum brings renowned speakers and thought leaders who discuss their leadership strategies. As a speaker at the Forum, Gower Author Alexander Manu was interviewed by Shaku Selvakumar for the IBM Impact 2011 Blog. In this interview Manu discusses in-depth the concepts of Imagination and Innovation in business Extract:
The redefinition of innovation as a human behaviour outcome, a dynamic in constant change, requires the shaping of new responses in business and the economy.
The past understanding of what innovation “is”, was generally connected with a breakthrough in technology – some new tool being employed in some new way. This understanding limits the potential of innovation as bound by the tools employed, instead of the imagination employing them. The latent imagination triggered by an innovation outcome is the true goal of innovation. It is not what “I can do with this now”? but “what can I become doing this in the future”? The tool is not a response, but a question. Every innovation is a question. The truly important innovations are a series of questions.
A few definitions: Innovation is an outcome, a new behaviour, a new way of doing things. Disruption is a behavior – an outcome involving a media and a user – changed by invention. Invention is a moment of discovery or creation of something new. Disruptive Business means the sum of new behaviours and their support models. Innovation is a moment of use, a manifest behaviour that engages an innovation object into new uses, and modifies the habitual conditions of the present.
This position challenges the current understanding of innovation, and some of the labels applied to innovation typologies, such as the label “disruptive innovation”. In general, the current discourse around innovation addresses competently the technology side of an invention, at the expense of the motivational side of the user, the human motivation which leads in the behaviour of use.
Alexander Manu is Chief Imaginator and Senior Partner at InnoSpa. He is the author of Distruptive Business: Desire, Innovation and the Re-design of Business published by Gower.
