Community Forum – Resourcing Intellectual Property

How do you resource intellectual property?

How is Intellectual Property resourced at your company (Legal, R&D within Business, and R&D from the center/Corp)?   How many resources do you have in each function and how many people in your organization do they support?  What are the roles and responsibilities of each function? – Manager, Intellectual Property Strategy, Global Consumer Products Company

Community Responses

Terry Tice, Senior Manager, Human Resources, United Technologies
Intellectual Property for us is resourced in Legal.  It reports to our General Counsel, who has an IP legal background and we also have 3 IP attorneys, 1 IP paralegal and a contracts managers for an approximately 500 person research center.  We also have a shared IP attorney in Shanghai that all the United Technologies divisions utilize, include our China research center.

Judy Giordan, IRI Emerita
It depends on your IP strategy and your innovation productivity. Location is less important than value development required and strategic intent. The range of skill sets needed and best location for residence of the IP function is linked to your strategy, while the latter (innovation productivity) determines the capacity you need to deliver. Organizationally, IP can also be a stand-alone strategic business unit in addition to the three options you listed – this too depends on strategic intent.

In my past roles as VP R&D, etc., IP from an initiation, development, oversight and strategic perspective has been in R&D with a link for the legal aspects to the legal function. In all of these cases, out licensing of IP was not part of the strategy – development and protection of IP was. An example of this construct and philosophy is represented in the RTM article:  It’s Time to Think Differently About R&D Assets and the CTO’s Role.

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