This article is part of the Open Foresight Board (OFB) initiative of the CEIPI IP Business Academy, which examines how industrial leaders use IP management to reshape their sectors. The OFB explores these cases as strategic signposts for the wider IP community, and this contribution falls under the Open Foresight Program.

Why a Shipping and Logistics Company Belongs in a Foresight Column

When people think about transformative IP strategies, they usually picture consumer electronics, pharma, or big tech. Yet one of the most strategically exposed IP theatres of this decade is global shipping and logistics. A.P. Moller – Maersk (Maersk) is among the largest container shipping and logistics groups worldwide, connecting trade flows across more than a hundred countries and sitting at the heart of global supply chains.

At the same time, shipping is under intense pressure to decarbonise. Maersk has publicly committed to ambitious climate targets and participates in collaborative initiatives that use intellectual property as a lever for the energy transition. A visible example is the ESG Smart Pool, a patent pool co-founded by Maersk, Siemens Energy and IPwe to open up access to more than 250 ESG-relevant patents in areas such as energy networks, materials, transport and maritime technologies. You can see this initiative described in more detail in the PR announcement on the ESG Smart Pool and in a recent overview of ESG-related patent pools.

This is the context in which Simone Frattasi, Head of Global IP at Maersk, has emerged as one of the most forward-looking IP leaders in the Nordic region and in the logistics and maritime industries more broadly.

From Wireless Engineering to Business-Oriented IP Leadership

Frattasi’s professional journey moves seamlessly between technology, law and management. He started as a telecoms engineer, completed a PhD in wireless and mobile communications, and later qualified as a European Patent Attorney. Over time he combined this technical grounding with leadership roles in private practice and in-house positions, including responsibility for patent activities at Sony Mobile Communications, before taking over the global IP function at Maersk.

A decisive element in this trajectory is his formal education in IP management. Frattasi completed the University Diploma in IP Business Administration (DU IPBA), a programme co-labelled by CEIPI and the European Patent Office that covers IP strategy, valuation, portfolio management and leadership for IP professionals. The structure and content of this diploma are described on the CEIPI programme page and in the IP Business Academy overview of the co-labelled DU IPBA.

This blend of engineering, prosecution experience, corporate practice and structured IP management education explains why his work at Maersk feels so systemic: IP is treated as part of the company’s operating model, not as a purely legal speciality.

Building a Modern IP Function at the Heart of Global Logistics

Inside Maersk, Frattasi has shaped an IP organisation that spans patents, trademarks, brand protection and risk management, closely tied to the company’s strategic ambition to transform its business model and decarbonise its operations. Interviews and event descriptions consistently highlight how his team uses formal IP strategies, stage-gate processes, portfolio evaluations and risk frameworks to align IP decisions with product development and sustainability efforts. A good illustration of this approach can be found in the Open Ears podcast episode “Innovating the IP business – new refreshing ways”, where Frattasi discusses Maersk’s IP organisation and its link to environmental and societal challenges. You can listen to this conversation via Apple Podcasts or the aera podcast page.

From an Open Foresight perspective, the key point is not a single process or tool, but the way IP becomes an internal operating language for Maersk’s innovation and transformation agenda: IP policies shape how projects are prioritised, how risks are documented and escalated, and how commercial teams discuss the value and role of technology assets along complex logistics chains.

ESG Smart Pool and the IP Charter for Energy Transition (IP4ET)

Frattasi’s influence extends well beyond the walls of Maersk. He is one of the architects behind new collaborative models that explicitly connect IP to the energy transition.

The first is the already mentioned ESG Smart Pool. Together with Siemens Energy and IPwe, Maersk has pooled a portfolio of ESG-focused patents and offers more accessible, cost-efficient licences to actors who want to deploy them in sustainable solutions. This concept is laid out in the official ESG Smart Pool announcement, and its relevance for the broader energy-tech landscape is analysed in Baker Botts’ discussion of emerging energy technology patent pools as well as in Lawyer Monthly’s article on licensing ESG technologies.

The second is the IP Charter for Energy Transition (IP4ET), a member-driven community with currently around 40 members co-founded by Maersk and Rouse. The charter’s motto is “Collaboration Drives Sustainable Evolution” and its mission is threefold: 1) to raise awareness and educate IP professionals on the implications of climate change; 2) to reduce the carbon footprint of IP operations; and 3) to develop best practices for using IP portfolios, licensing and enforcement in support of climate goals. You can see the charter presented on the official IP4ET website and in the Rouse–Maersk launch announcement. World Intellectual Property Review also covered IP4ET as a novel attempt to tackle so-called “patent pollution” in IP-intensive industries, as summarised in this WIPR feature.

Here, IP is not positioned as a barrier that slows down the energy transition, but as an enabler: a framework that allows companies to share and deploy critical technologies in a controlled, value-conscious way while reducing emissions and legal friction.

Nordic IP Day: Turning a Corporate HQ into a Scandinavian IP Lab

Another important part of Frattasi’s impact is the creation of shared learning spaces for IP professionals. What began as Maersk IP Day has evolved into Nordic IP Day, an event normally hosted at Maersk’s Copenhagen headquarters that attracts around 170 practitioners from many industries and around 90 companies across Scandinavia.

In his own communications, Frattasi has presented Nordic IP Day as an expanding forum for “IP management innovation”, where topics include operational IP management, sustainability, collaboration models and the changing role of IP departments in corporate strategy. You can see this positioning in his LinkedIn announcement for Nordic IP Day and in the follow-up programme post.

Episodes of the Open Ears podcast underline how Nordic IP Day has become a platform for exploring new ways of structuring IP work to respond to environmental, social and technological challenges. In that sense, Maersk’s headquarters functions as a Scandinavian IP lab where shipping, energy, tech and manufacturing companies learn from each other’s experiments.

Patent Portfolio Management as a Discipline – from Book to dIPlex

A distinctive feature of Frattasi’s work is the attention he gives to patent portfolio management as a discipline in its own right. Together with Jean-Claude Alexandre Ho, he co-authored the book Patent Portfolio Management: A Practical Guide, published by Edward Elgar Publishing. The book proposes a visual, stepwise approach to building and steering patent portfolios along the whole lifecycle – from capturing inventions to aligning portfolios with business objectives, pruning low-value assets and supporting licensing or collaboration. You can find an in-depth review on the IP Business Academy’s blog: “Review of ‘Patent Portfolio Management’ by Simone Frattasi and Jean-Claude Alexandre Ho”.

Within digital IP lexicon, 🧭dIPlex, Frattasi curates a dedicated topic page on Patent Portfolio Management that summarises many of these ideas and connects them to broader IP management concepts. The page is accessible via the dIPlex entry on Patent Portfolio Management. It sits within a growing structure of dIPlex resources that link operational IP management to strategy, valuation and education.

For the Open Foresight Board, this matters because it shows that Frattasi is not only implementing isolated tools inside one company; he is actively contributing to a shared language and toolkit for IP departments across industries.

Recognition in the Global IP Community

The broader IP ecosystem has taken note. Frattasi’s profile and publications are prominently featured in the IPBA Connect environment, as captured in the IPBA author archive for Simone Frattasi. He is also listed among the leading international IP strategists in rankings such as IAM Strategy 300 – The World’s Leading IP Strategists, and appears in commentary on emerging issues such as ESG patent licensing and “patent pollution”.

Combined with his teaching activities for training providers and his participation in standardisation discussions, this recognition underscores that his work is seen as a reference point well beyond the Nordic or maritime world.

Why Simone Frattasi Fits “Industrial Architects of IP-Impact”

From the perspective of the Industrial Architects of IP-Impact column and the Open Foresight Board, Simone Frattasi illustrates several structural shifts in IP management:

  • IP as a sustainability lever in heavy industries
    In one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, he treats IP portfolios, licensing and risk management as tools to accelerate sustainable technology adoption rather than as purely defensive mechanisms.
  • IP as a management system, not a legal add-on
    The way Maersk’s IP function is organised – with explicit strategies, processes, training and community formats – shows how IP can become part of the company’s operating grammar for innovation and transformation.
  • IP as a shared discipline across sectors
    Through his book on patent portfolio management, his dIPlex page on Patent Portfolio Management and his teaching, he contributes to a more standardised and practice-oriented understanding of how corporate patent portfolios create value.

Taken together, these elements justify describing Simone Frattasi as a leading IP-management innovator, and as a shaper of modern, business-oriented and ESG-sensitive IP management more broadly. For the IP community and for users of the IP system, his work provides a concrete blueprint for how IP departments can support – rather than obstruct – the profound transformations that global supply chains are currently undergoing.