Intellectual property

Strategies to help companies mitigate the legal risk and ensure they're in compliance with the law.

People aren’t getting dumber, but they’re often treated that way. Politicians, educators, and the media assume the public is uncomfortable with nuance and grateful for prescribed solutions. Business, too, is being progressively dumbed down, not only by book authors who teach management by parable but also by managers themselves. Ironically, the infantilization of work is […]

Most executives think they’re security conscious—they change their passwords and shred important documents and so forth. But what rarely crosses their minds, says espionage expert H. Keith Melton, is that cloak-and-dagger types really are after their valuables. Just because you’re not paranoid, he observes, doesn’t mean they’re not following you. Melton, the author of Ultimate […]

Fears of forced technology transfer are overblown.

The story of Disney and Pixar.

A hybrid-automotive supplier worries about losing its intellectual property.

The hope that an entrepreneurial industry can help reverse global warming misses one critical point: Innovation takes time. Lots of time.

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Movie studios and record companies should take note.

In 1976, Genentech, the first biotechnology company, was founded by a young venture capitalist and a university professor to exploit recombinant DNA technology....

Squeezing today’s innovations into yesterday’s system simply won’t work.

The recent Supreme Court ruling wasn’t a cure-all.

Neither markets nor managers accurately value investments in intangibles like R&D, studies show. The result: misallocated resources. The solution: read on.

Companies in many industries are feeling immense pressure to improve their ability to innovate. But executives know that the best ideas aren't always...

The finding: Innovations developed by individuals who give them away increasingly compete with patent-protected, for-profit innovations in many parts of the economy. The research: Recent studies of representative samples of adults in the U.S., Japan, and the UK have found that many consumer products are developed by consumers themselves instead of by companies intending to […]

A Taiwanese manufacturer of hybrid-car parts faces risks to its proprietary technology in its partnership with a Chinese automaker. Case Study authored...

A new study shows that during the Cold War, corporate spying generated significant economic returns for East German companies. It was so successful, in...

When commercializing scientific discoveries, inventors and firms face several potentially fatal traps. Here’s how to avoid falling into them.

Noncompetes are bad for innovation; protecting information is essential.

Reprint: R0309E Despite companies' almost fanatical worship of innovation, most new products don't generate money. That's because executives don't realize...