Learning from Google: How companies can turn IP into assets

Mike Herd, executive director of the Sussex Innovation Centre, encourages businesses to look to Google for inspiration on how to turn intellectual property into commercially successful products or services.

Until recently, Google has experienced unprecedented growth, becoming the world’s largest search engine in 2000 and enjoying a $6bn stock market flotation in August 2004.

The company, set up by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, has been praised throughout the world for its success in harnessing the creativity of its staff to create revenue-generating services. This has been one of the driving forces behind the company’s astronomical success.

The search engine’s mission statement claims that ‘even the best technology can be improved’ and ‘innovation is [their] bloodline’. The company even encourages staff to spend 20% of their time on ‘fun personal projects’, an approach that has led to marketable ideas as diverse as Google Earth, Froogle and Gmail.

Whilst individually some of these ideas may not be money-spinning successes, they are added to the ever-growing portfolio of services that keep millions of users returning to use its search engine.

British businesses often talk about the need to harness IP, but seem to have less success than their American counterparts, or indeed many European businesses. In fact the most recent edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard only rated the UK “average” – lagging behind Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark.

Yet, the UK is widely regarded as one of the most innovative countries in the world and in my experience it is mainly a lack of knowledge or encouragement to make the most of innovation and explore possible partnerships, rather than a lack of innovation itself, that holds the country back.

Constant development is the key to continued success

People will often only look for innovation and commercially valuable IP at the start of a new product process, asking themselves ‘how do we invent a new product’ or ‘we’ve got a new product / service idea, how do we make this into a business?’

This is why innovation is commonly associated with the creation of new companies; a new business structure is generally created to take a new idea forward. But as Google’s example shows, continuous innovation is essential for the ongoing growth of a successful company.

Most companies are comfortable sitting on a single innovation or product and simply don’t have the time or resources to develop new intellectual property. Whilst this may make money in the short term, companies run the risk of stalling if they fail to continually develop.

Innovation is not just about invention

Innovation is all about the successful introduction of new ideas into the marketplace; it’s not necessarily about invention. All too often I see companies that get stuck in an ‘only invented here’ syndrome, internalising the development and marketing of innovations to defend the market position of their ideas.

However, to turn IP into a commercial asset for your company you must look beyond the confines of your own business and explore potential marketing and partnership opportunities with other parties.

Most small and medium sized companies are not equipped to generate new research and development; they are organised to make, sell and deliver. And whilst a start-up company based around the research and development of their ideas may well have the intellectual property they may not have the market knowledge or experience to take it further.

Likewise, established companies will have the infrastructure, market channels, experience, sales force and resources to push innovations forwards but may not necessarily have the new product ideas or knowledge of the technology to create the next generation of products.

It may be the case that a partner company could use your intellectual property in another market, or that you could develop someone else’s ideas using your own industry experience.

Either way, leveraging external knowledge bases through collaboration between companies, can provide obvious benefits to both developers and marketers that want to create commercially successful assets out of their intellectual property.

At the Sussex Innovation Centre (www.sinc.co.uk), we are helping companies to create a greater exposure for products and ideas into wider markets where they may have little experience. Our New Product Network brings together developers and potential resellers, increasing the opportunities for wider application of ideas which could be commercially applied in other sectors.