Intellectual property

Should companies control all the ways people experience art?

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 […]

They restrict employee mobility.

Fears of forced technology transfer are overblown.

When blockbuster drugs give way to generics, pharmaceutical companies like Novartis must find new ways to grow.

The story of Disney and Pixar.

Make yourself a harder target.

The music industry, described in breezy prose in John Alderman's Sonic Boom: MP3, Napster, and the New Pioneers of Music, is coming under intense pressure...

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

With China now in the World Trade Organization, opportunities for multinational corporations are multiplying and evolving fast—and so are the accompanying underlying perils.

Movie studios and record companies should take note.

Sheldon Bloomfield, senior vice-president of character properties for Multi-Media Worldwide, has a hit with Baby Ruby. Originally a children's book character,...

How to identify, map, and leverage some of your company’s most strategic assets

Last week, I wrote about the dangers of overly relying on quantitative market research when developing innovation opportunities. A tendency to seek "safety...

Chief Security Officers have some tough choices to make.

For generations, Procter & Gamble generated most of its phenomenal growth by innovating from within--building global research facilities and hiring the...

Corporations battle intellectual property theft in courtrooms, through international agencies, and with embedded technologies. But while these organizations turn a fierce antipiracy face to the world, many of their employees are blithely downloading or swapping files illegally—and doing it at work. Tolerance of that behavior sends a mixed message about the organization’s commitment to intellectual […]

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

Noncompetes are bad for innovation; protecting information is essential.

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