Patent Design and Management for new innovative ecosystems – PatentLab

The proposed project deals with the managerial actions associated to the design of intellectual property (IP). From the one side, IP is seen as a source of competitive advantage, as a strategic element that can ensure revenue flows or demonstrate the organizational entity‘s innovative capacity. From the other side, IP management is becoming more complex and resource demanding than ever before. Considering both, we investigate the existing managerial practices related to IP management, such as IP valorization and protection, and demonstrate that the most common managerial actions consider IP as given. Nowadays the issue is more on a capacity to formulate the patent proposals. It is not an issue of only protecting patents but creating the new assets for IP. This issue is relevant for a variety of actors such as universities, research centers, start ups, PMEs, big companies.
The proposed project deals with the issues of the intellectual property (IP) management from the design perspective. In this perspective, IP can be seen as a source of an asset to be designed in order to anticipate value creation. In this case, actors design and develop their future assets coupled with better IP management. By extending the research on the IP, innovation and strategy management with the engineering design research, our objective is to work on the IP design as a strategic advantage to develop stronger asset portfolio and ensure the appropriation and diffusion of the IP portfolios within the new ecosystems. We aim to develop a theoretical, contingent framework for the strategic design of IP that takes into account available knowledge. The project brings together researchers and practitioners to ensure the multi-disciplinary competencies in management, economics, law and engineering design to theoretically and empirically investigate the design of patent portfolio and the role that the IP portfolio can play on the strategy of a company and its ecosystem. This collaborative research will lead to the elaboration of the best practices and tools for the effective IP management in case of open collaborative innovation.