In the last week of January 2024 the MIPLM started at the CEIPI with the first module on IP Strategy development. IP Strategy development is the first core process which is defined in the relevant standards for quality in IP management and innovation management and therefore the basis for the education in IP management. Nevertheless, after the IP strategy and its goals were defined the IP manager has in the next step the task to take care that the IP, needed to achieve the defined goal, is generated. This can be challenging, since the inventions to generate the needed patent portfolio are often not yet made. How to overcome this challenge and how to make and harvest inventions on demand was the topic of this year’s MIPLM dinner speaker Dr. Robert Klinski, who described his tried and tested approach for invention harvesting to the new class of the MIPLM on 30.01.2024.

The digital transformation is changing not only how products and services look like, but also how they are developed. Product development does less and less follow the classical principle of waterfall project management, but more agile methods adopted from software development are used. Additionally, the development of smart products differs also drastically from the incremental innovations known e.g. from classical engineering. Here, known product features are not only slightly improved, but a huge scope of possible digital use cases has opened, which may all have the potential to disrupt the industry. Therefore, modern and digital IP management differs drastically from the “waiting for inventions” from the R&D, which was and sometimes still is practiced in companies, but actively tries to identify and protect the most lucrative use cases with inventions and IP created on demand.

To do that companies can draw from the pool of tried approaches, like the Lean Startup method developed by Eric Ries. The lean startup method by Eric Ries aims at a lean structure, which has minimal wasteful parts and a maximal value production. This should be achieved by the introduction of a minimum viable product (MVP), which is continuously improved with the customer feedback in build-measure-learn cycles. These cycles focus on the principles of lean thinking and agility. These concepts are especially useful dealing with fast and agile development, which is typical in the digital transformation. Since digital inventors often have adopted the agile development from software development, the lean startup method became very popular and is ideal for the creation of inventions on demand required for invention harvesting.

Here you can read a summary of the dinner speech.

About our dinner speaker:

Robert Klinski is the founder of Patentship, and a German and European patent, trademark and design attorney. He studied electrical engineering and telecoms at the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg and received his PhD with honours from the Technical University of Munich in the field of statistical signal processing in telecoms. He was a scientific researcher and engineer at Fraunhofer and Siemens, respectively.

Dr. Klinski has been working in the IP field since 2002. He has profound experience in IP prosecution, litigation and harvesting as well as generating intellectual property on demand in the fields of digital signal processing, 5G, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, big data, security, blockchain and cryptography.