Company Value is in IP, not PR

Companies often act as though marketing and image were everything. Promote yourself enough and you're bound to succeed. but as any good marketer knows, good promotion only helps if you have something to promote. A great campaign can actually be the fastest way to kill a company. that's because ultimately there has to be substance - something that people really want and that the company owns.

A court has ordered Vonage to pay $58 million as well as 5.5% of future revenue to Verizon for infringing on three patents out of the seven over which the latter originally sued. Vonage says it will appeal and Verizon isn't getting the injunction against operating that it wanted. But there's a lesson here: underestimate the power of intellectual property at your own peril. Vonage says that it has workarounds to avoid further infringement. So why didn't it have a lawyer review what it was doing early on when anyone could have guessed that there were many patented features and technologies in telecommunications? Because most companies simply don't get IP, as I noted in 2004 in both the Financial Times and Chief Executive. They don't see how they can use intellectual property as a strategic weapon - and they don't see how others could as well.

Would a CEO take factories and warehouses for granted? Inventory? IT systems? Intellectual property is probably more fundamentally important than any of these and it's the least understood and guarded asset at most companies. Think your company is the exception? Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Could you print out a list of your patents?
2. Out of those patents, could you immediately identify the 10 that offer you the greatest strategic advantage?
3. Have you profiled the IP inventory of your biggest competitors?
4. Do you know without asking which technologies critical to your business are owned by other companies?
5. Do your R&D efforts - whether in products or services - happen within a solid IP strategy?

If you answered no even once, you've got a potentially serious problem on your hands.