Whether you call it “harvesting intangible assets” or “intellectual property management,” organizations must make the most of everything they have to offer if they want to remain competitive......

Harvesting Intangible Assets


Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company's Intellectual Property

Author: Andrew J. Sherman

Pub Date: October 2011

Your Price: $29.95

ISBN: 9780814416990

Overview

Discover how you can turn your company’s intangible assets into REAL profit.

Whether you call it “harvesting intangible assets” or “intellectual property management,” organizations must make the most of everything they have to offer if they want to remain competitive. Yet, the majority of companies are oblivious to the wealth of revenue-producing opportunities hiding just below the strategic surface.

In this thought-provoking book, author Andrew J. Sherman shares insights and expertise gleaned from his work with some of the world’s leading companies who have capitalized on intellectual assets such as patents, trademarks, customer information, software codes, databases, business models, home-grown processes, and employee expertise. Featuring instructive examples from organizations including Proctor & Gamble, IBM, and Google, the book reveals how companies large or small can implement IP-driven growth and licensing strategies, foster a culture of innovation, turn R&D into revenue, and much more.

Smart companies reap what they sow. This book gives readers the tools they need for a profitable harvest.

About the Author

ANDREW J. SHERMAN is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Jones Day and a top-rated Adjunct Professor in the MBA and Executive MBA programs at the University of Maryland. An internationally recognized authority on the legal and strategic aspects of business growth, he is frequently called upon by the media to share his expertise. He has been featured or quoted in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Investor’s Business Daily, Forbes, Entrepreneur, U.S. News & World Report, and other prestigious publications. His approach to leveraging intellectual assets was a cover story for Inc. magazine. He is the author of several books, including Mergers and Acquisitions from A to Z, Raising Capital, and Franchising and Licensing.



Press release

HARVESTING INTANGIBLE ASSETS

Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property

A Framework and the Tools to Rebuild American Business on a Foundation of Innovation and Knowledge

Innovation is widely hailed as the key to seizing competitive advantage and sustaining profitability. Yet, most companies allocate little structured attention to cultivating this precious resource. Why, in the age of know-how, show-how, relationships, and best practices, do companies routinely overlook the critical need to manage and extract value from creativity and knowledge? Why, in a business climate demanding transparency and accountability, is there a striking lack of discipline regarding assets we can’t necessarily touch, but that are clearly driving the lion’s share of revenue for Apple, Google, IBM, 3M, Amazon, Netflix, Priceline, and countless other companies?

In HARVESTING INTANGIBLE ASSETS: Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property (AMACOM, 2011), Andrew J. Sherman challenges business leaders to question the popular motivational approach to fostering innovation and creativity, as well as the standard emphasis on balance sheets over home-grown processes, informal collaborations, and employee expertise. Based on his work with some of the world’s most innovative and successful companies, Sherman presents systematic methods for managing, measuring, maximizing, commercializing, and protecting the greatest sources of value—concrete, bottom-line, as well as shareholder value—in today’s information-centric, innovation-driven world.

Reaching out to leaders at all levels in companies of all kinds, from executives at Fortune 1000 corporations to start-up entrepreneurs, Sherman urges readers to strive to transform business as usual. “Innovation includes new approaches, new business models, new channels, new value propositions, new pricing, new packaging, and new marketing and branding strategies,” he makes clear. “Not all innovation is breakthrough and life changing, but it often can provide new product lines, new services, new revenue streams, and new profit centers for companies of all sizes.”

Packed with instructive examples from an array of innovative companies—Apple, Charles Schwab, Chipotle, Cisco, Dow Chemical, Dunkin’ Donuts, Google, IBM, Jiffy Lube, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, and 3M among them—HARVESTING INTANGIBLE ASSETS also provides a wealth of strategic guidance and tactical action plans. While gaining a new appreciation for the untapped value of the intellectual capital within their own organizations, readers will learn how to:

* Assess their organization’s attitude, appetite, aptitude, alignment, access, allocation, and adaptability for innovation.

* Plant the seeds for fostering a culture of innovation, starting by empowering employees to let down their guards and risk failure without fear—or dire financial loss to the company.

* Embrace intrapreneurship as a central part of their company’s mission, values, and branding, and set clear and consistent intrapreneurship policies, strategies, and structures.

* Master Intellectual Asset Management—a comprehensive system for creating, organizing, prioritizing, and extracting value from their company’s cultural assets (mission, values, norms, and more); relationship assets (from customer loyalty to vendor alliances to Web 2.0 branding); human assets (workforce expertise, creativity, collaboration, and more); practices assets (including communication and training systems); and intellectual property (from patents to trade secrets).

* Develop a legal strategy to protect their key intellectual and creative assets, with a firm grasp on patents, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, and trade dress.

* Excel at creating and launching new products and services without betraying their trusted brand reputation or alienating their established customer base.

* Adopt a business model to sustain innovation and leverage its financial rewards, with highlights of cooperatives, channel partners, licensing, joint ventures, and franchising.

Sherman culminates his book with a hope-filled yet highly feasible look at the future of innovation for American business. Eye-opening, thought-provoking, and focused on tangible results, HARVESTING INTANGIBLE ASSETS reveals the true business value of innovation and provides the tools today’s business leaders need to sow and reap its promise.



About the Author

Andrew J. Sherman is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Jones Day, a global law firm with nearly 2,500 attorneys worldwide, and a top-rated Adjunct Professor in the MBA and Executive MBA programs at the University of Maryland. He is also the founder of Grow Fast Grow Right, an education and training company with operations in the United States, Canada, India, and Europe. An internationally recognized authority and leading speaker on the legal and strategic aspects of business growth, he is frequently called upon by the media to share his expertise. He has been featured or quoted in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Investor’s Business Daily, Forbes, Entrepreneur, U.S. News & World Report, and other prestigious publications. He has addressed many widely recognized business and trade groups as a keynote or featured speaker, including recent presentations for the Association for Corporate Growth, American Corporate Counsel Association, and the New York Times Summit on Small Business.

Sherman is the author of 18 books, including the recent three-part Kaplan business growth series, Grow Fast Grow Right, and three previous titles for AMACOM: Mergers & Acquisitions from A to Z, Raising Capital, and Franchising and Licensing. His approach to leveraging intellectual assets was a cover story for Inc. magazine.



Cultivating & Maintaining a Culture of Innovation

Cultivating and Maintaining a Culture of Innovation

Proven Principles and Best Practices

It’s a universally accepted fact of business: innovation is vital to every company’s long-term success. What’s still wide open to debate is: How does an organization successfully foster, establish, and sustain a genuine culture of innovation? As Andrew J. Sherman, a noted expert on intellectual property management and business growth, shows in his new book, HARVESTING INTANGIBLE ASSETS (AMACOM, 2011), the answer can be found in the trusted principles and practices of highly successful innovative companies. They include:

* Google’s 70/20/10 rule. Each employee should spend 70 percent of his or her time working on the core business, 20 percent working on ways to extend or expand the core, and 10 percent thinking completely outside the box. At Google, the 20 percent window has been very productive, yielding many of the company’s recent innovations, including Gmail, Google News, and AdServe.

* 3M’s 30 percent/4 year rule. At 3M, 30 percent of total sales must result from products introduced within the past four years, forcing innovative products to have an almost immediate impact on the top and bottom lines. This rule is supported by the 15 percent rule, which allows technical personnel to spend 15 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing without any prior approvals.

* Cast a wide net. Innovation can come from many sources—both inside and outside a company. Look to customers, vendors, and even competitors as sources for new ideas and guidance on improving existing products and service. “Do not allow your culture to suffer from NIH (not invented here) syndrome, which assumes that ideas not generated by the leaders of the organization cannot possibly be worthy of consideration,” Sherman urges.

* Stay close to customer needs. Innovation doesn’t pay unless there’s a market for it. UPM, a Finnish paper manufacturer, has established a novel practice to ensure that its R&D teams keep focused on customer needs: brainstorming with value-chain players across the paper industry, from large commercial printers to paper wholesalers and retailers.

* Embrace the headless tiger. Microsoft continued to do it without Bill Gates. Apple will continue to do it without Steve Jobs. Since visionary founders and leaders don’t stay with their companies forever, the company’s culture must be prepared to innovate with or without their day-to-day presence. Team-driven innovation works to create leaders at all levels that can sustain and strengthen the founder’s vision long after he or she steps down. Maintaining a culture of innovation depends on investments in training, commitments to empowerment and delegation, and the development of meaningful succession plans.

* Let the RATS in. An effective, ongoing innovation process requires a systematic approach and commitment to the deployment of “RATS”: Resources, including human capital, time, and supplies; Advocacy, from both internal and external advocates who will help secure resources and provide emotional support for innovative projects; Testing and evaluation to predict the financial return on the resources invested; and Sustainable demand, based on the identification of target customers, markets, channels, and potential strategic partners.

* Make it fun—and remain open minded. Fun can be functional and productive. Game playing, role playing, experimenting, exercises, retreats, and parties can all facilitate creative thinking. Fun liberates the brain, allowing people to break down barriers and look beyond what they’re expected to see. For example, consider Viagra. In the early 1990s, Pfizer began testing a compound to treat certain cardiovascular diseases. One of the observed side effects was not at all what they expected. “Needless to say,” as Sherman observes, “a little repackaging and repositioning, and the rest is history.”

Adapted from HARVESTING INTANGIBLE ASSETS: Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property by Andrew J. Sherman (AMACOM, 2011).



Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Intellectual Capital Agrarian

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so

much to so many in such a short period of time.

—BILL GATES

We are all farmers.

We mark our turf. We protect our property. We plant our

seeds. We nurture the soil. We plow our land. We combat

adverse weather and ecosystem conditions and overcome adversities.

We prepare for our harvest. We carefully remove the frost

from the vine. We hope for the best and prepare for the worst

as the market sets a price for our efforts. We embrace the notion

that our results will be directly tied to our levels of effort and

expertise. We begin anew.

No matter what your profession, no matter what your company

does, no matter what your life situation may be—we all

follow this fundamental and deeply rooted agricultural process in

some way throughout the days of our lives. We are all the new

agrarians. But do we recognize ourselves as such? Have we

learned from the successes and failures of the agrarian economies

that preceded us? Can we learn to apply the traditional as well

as the latest best practices of farming to our daily lives and in

the growth of our companies? How can we make our lives more

enjoyable and enriching and our companies more productive and

profitable by adopting an agrarian approach to life planning, time

management, resource allocation, innovation harvesting, and

business model reshaping?

Consider the following questions as they apply to your life

and to your business:

- Have you carefully selected a territory that is fertile for

growth and right for your type of crop?

- Do you understand the dynamics of your ecosystem?

- Have you done everything in your power to properly nurture

the soil and enhance the land’s ability to produce?

- What seeds will you plant, and why?

- Are you ready to invest the time and energy to care for these

seeds once planted?

- Whom will you hire to help you raise, harvest, and sell the

produce at your farm?

- What tools, resources, and expertise will you require to

maximize the fruits of your harvest?

- What adverse weather or market conditions must you

overcome to be successful?

- Who else is growing these same crops? How does their experience

compare to your own?

- Do you have a keen sense for the cycles and timetables that

will optimize your harvest?

- What is your game plan for bringing your crops to the

marketplace? Will you do it alone or join with others?

- What are your distribution channels, and who are your target

customers? On what basis and criteria will they select your

harvest rather than others’? On the basis of price? Quality?

Convenience? Availability?

- How will you allocate the revenues that this year’s harvest

will bring? Have you performed a sensitivity analysis based on

high/expected/low target ranges?

- What steps need to be put in place to set the stage for

beginning the process again?

- What have you learned from the successes and failures of last

year’s process to make next year even better?

Each of these questions must be answered by every type of

farmer every year in every country around the world. Every year,

they ‘‘bet the farm,’’ overcoming the challenges of the wind, sun,

drought, floods, and other conditions beyond their control to put

food on all of our tables. But the questions also apply to each of

us—in the growth and development of our companies and as

applied to the growth and development of ourselves as humans

and as an evolving society. And, just as with farming, if we care

for the soil and harvest properly, we produce value. If we overwork

or overtax the farm and add too many pesticides over too

much irrigation, the outputs will be limited and potentially dangerous.

Farmers who strive to perfect this process and to learn from

the successes and failures of each year’s harvest enjoy financial

stability and wealth creation. They work hard to control the

variables that are in their power and develop contingency plans

around the variables that they can’t control. They see the crops

as an extension of themselves and are happy as they see them

grow and progress. They enjoy the process and connect with the

land in a spiritual way. But at the very core and soul of their

existence is the relationship between themselves and their land

and between their tools and their seeds and between the quality

of their harvest and the dynamics of the marketplace.

In building companies and fostering innovation, we must all

embrace these same principles. We must put conditions in place

that support a corporate culture likely to yield a productive harvest

and be constantly planting the seeds of creativity, encouragement,

curiosity, empathy, respect, challenge, and fulfillment. We

must understand which tools will be most effective for reinforcing

the underlying principles of this culture. We must take steps

to manage the conditions that are within our control and develop

‘‘Plan Bs’’ for those that we can’t. Most important, we must fully

invest in the growth and development of our human capital by

providing education and training to our teams at all levels to

teach how to become farmers inside our companies and in their

own lives.



Table of Contents

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1 The Intellectual Capital Agrarian

Time to Market

Balance Sheets: An Archaic Measure of a

Company’s True Intrinsic Value

The Tomato Exercise

Challenges for the New Agrarian

A Commitment to New Agrarianism

CHAPTER 2 Planting the Seeds: Fostering a Culture of

Innovation

Building a Genuine Culture of Innovation

Leadership and Governance Principles for

Fostering a Culture of Innovation

Leadership Archetypes in Fostering a Culture

of Innovation

Building Agrarian Teams

Best Practices in Fostering and Maintaining a

Culture of Innovation

CHAPTER 3 Irrigating the Field: Embracing

Intrapraneurship

Intrapreneurship and Leadership

Spin-Offs

Why Does Intrapreneurship Go Ignored or

Misunderstood in So Many Companies?

CHAPTER 4 Caring for the Fruits of the Harvest:

Intellectual Asset Management (IAM)

What Is Intellectual Asset Management?

Building an Effective IAM System

Conducting an IP Audit

Measuring the Results of Innovation

Key Quantitative Metrics in Measuring

Innovation

CHAPTER 5 Building Fences to Protect Your Turf:

Developing a Legal Strategy

Legal Management of Intellectual

Property

The Allocation of Legal Budgets

Understanding Intellectual Property

Laws

Patents

Trademarks and Service Marks

Copyrights

Trade Secrets

Trade Dress

Can This Business Model Be Sustained?

CHAPTER 6 Separating the Wheat from the Chaff:

Readying Crops for the Market

Some Best Practices and Common

Mistakes

A Reality Test for Effective Agrarianism

Inventor’s Syndrome

Pilots and Pioneers

Some Lessons from Companies That Are

Particularly Strong at New Product

Development

A Four-Step Filtering Tool

CHAPTER 7 Bringing the Crops to the Marketplace: An

Overview of Strategic Alternatives

Four Critical Steps in Building an Agrarian

Leveraging Plan

Best Practices in the Development of the

ALP

CHAPTER 8 Harvesting the Power of Intellectual Capital

Leveraging: Cooperatives, Customers,

Channel Partners, Licensing, Joint Ventures,

and Franchising

Cooperatives and Consortiums

Patent Pooling

Open Sourcing and Open Platforming

Crowdsourcing and the Wisdom of

Crowds

Building Effective Multiple-Channel Partner

Relationships

Joint Ventures and Strategic Partnering

Licensing Strategies to Drive Revenues and

Profits

Franchising

CHAPTER 9 The Global Intellectual Asset Frontier

The Global Landscape

Brick Innovation Walls for the ‘‘BRICS’’

Intellectual Capital Agrarianism and Global

Economic Development

Stages of International Expansion

Compliance Programs

Advantages and Disadvantages of Various

Forms of Doing Business Overseas

CHAPTER 10 The Future of Innovation

The STEM Initiatives

Diversity and Innovation

Faster, Better, Cheaper, Easier

(Choose Two)

Consumers Know What They Want

(Just Ask Them)

The Power of 80,000

Beyond Our Field of Vision

Spend Smarter, Not Bigger

Leveling the Playing Field

The Singularity Movement and the

Conveyance of Man and Machine

Going Private?

Bigger Bang for the Taxpayer’s Buck

Does Size Really Matter?

If You Want Big Ideas, Go to Where the Big

Brains Live

Learning from Our Agrarian Brethern

Head in the Clouds

Web 3.0 by 2013

Appendix Directory of Licensing Resources, Exchanges,

and Agents

Index