IP experts often enter strategic discussions with something genuinely relevant to say: about pricing power, market access, competitive advantage, the timing of a product launch. Although the argument is there, the message may not land.

The problem usually starts earlier than people think. Every message is heard through the role people already associate with the person delivering it, and in many organisations, the role associated with IP is a narrow one: protection, filing, risk, legal control, cost. These associations are not wrong, they describe part of the work. But they also act as a filter. When IP speaks about patents, the business tends to hear legal complexity. When IP speaks about risk, it hears delay. Even when the message is about growth or competitive advantage, it can still register as specialist commentary rather than strategic input.

This is not a communication problem in the ordinary sense. It is a narrative frame problem, and the difference matters.

How the frame gets built

No single person constructs the narrative frame around IP deliberately. It accumulates through repeated experience. The first time a business unit encounters IP is often when something goes wrong: a competitor files a blocking patent, a trademark conflict delays a launch, a freedom-to-operate opinion kills a product idea. These interactions are experienced as friction, cost or bad news. That impression tends to stick, and every subsequent interaction that confirms it reinforces the frame.

Over time, the organisation stops questioning it. IP becomes the function that shows up when something needs to be checked or defended, which is precisely what gets asked of it, which then confirms the perception again. It is self-reinforcing without anyone intending it to be. Leadership language solidifies it further: if the CFO consistently refers to IP as a cost line, if the CEO only mentions patents in the context of litigation risk, those signals travel fast and set expectations for how others in the organisation should relate to the function.

By the time an IP expert wants to speak about value creation, the audience is already listening through a frame that was built long before that conversation began.

Why individual effort has a ceiling

This is where the challenge becomes structural. An IP expert can adjust how they phrase things, starting with the business decision rather than the IP issue, connecting their work to outcomes the organisation cares about. That matters, and it is worth doing. But it has a ceiling.

One person speaking differently in meetings does not necessarily change what an entire organisation associates with a function. The frame is not held by one stakeholder. It is distributed across the organisation, embedded in how IP work is requested, how budgets are justified, how contributions are described after the fact. Changing it requires more than better messaging in the moment. It requires sustained, deliberate work on how IP is narrated over time, how outcomes are communicated upward, how the function becomes visible before the critical moment, how the IP expert positions themselves consistently across multiple touchpoints and relationships.

The clearest evidence of what a real frame shift looks like tends to come from companies preparing for an exit or a funding round. Suddenly IP is part of the investor conversation. It affects valuation, defensibility, deal structure. In that moment, the frame shifts almost automatically because the business context forces it. The expertise did not change. Only the context in which it was evaluated did. That suggests something important: the narrative frame around IP is not really about IP. It is about what the organisation is trying to decide, and whether IP has been positioned to be part of that decision before the moment arrives.

The role that needs to change

For a long time, IP has been narrated as something that comes after the important decision. The invention is made, then it is protected. The product is developed, then the risks are checked. The brand is created, then the trademark is filed. In this sequence, IP becomes a supporting function: necessary, valuable, highly specialised, but secondary. It enters when the direction has already been chosen.

Many of the most important IP questions do not arise after the strategy: they shape it. What should be protected because it may become a future value driver? Which technological advantage should remain secret rather than patented? How can an IP position support pricing, partnerships, funding or exit options? These are business questions, and if IP is brought into them too late, the business loses options quietly and usually without realising it.

This is why IP needs a new narrative role inside the organization, not to move away from protection, but to be understood as a capability that helps decide what is worth building, protecting, scaling and monetising in the first place. That shift is a positioning task as much as a communication task. And it is harder than it sounds, because the frame it needs to replace was not built through communication alone.

The strategic interpreter

The strongest IP experts I have worked with understand this intuitively. They do not try to change the frame through a single well-argued presentation. They work on it continuously: through the examples they choose in ordinary conversations, the questions they ask before they are asked, the language they use consistently across emails, reports and internal meetings. They move between technical, legal and commercial conversations without losing the thread, translating what they know into whatever decision context is in front of them. Although the knowledge stays the same, the entry point shifts each time.

What makes them influential is not only what they know. It is that the organisation has learned, over time, through repeated experience, to associate them with better decisions rather than with necessary process.

That kind of reputation is not built in the decisive boardroom moment. It is built before that moment, through deliberate and consistent positioning work. And it requires a clear understanding of something most IP experts have not been asked to think about: not just what they contribute, but what they want to be known for, and whether the way they currently show up is building that association or quietly reinforcing a different one.

Until then, a question to reflect on:

When you speak about IP inside the business, are you heard as someone who protects what already exists, or as someone who helps shape what should happen next?

About the columnist

Giulia Donato
Branding & Communication Advisor | Executive Coach | Lecturer
people & brand strategies
www.donatostrategies.com