Ben Goodger, a partner in the London office of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, is behind the launch of International IP Strategists Association, a global professional association focused on helping companies craft intellectual property strategies.
The fledgling association publicly announced its formation on May 26, but it has been ramping up behind the scenes since January 2010, Goodger said. The association hopes to make a big splash at the IP Business Congress in San Francisco, he said. The June 19-21 gathering of intellectual property and finance professionals is sponsored by Intellectual Asset Management, a bimonthly magazine.
“The big launch is at the IP Business Conference,” Goodger said. “We don’t see this as [just] a U.K./ European thing right now.”
Goodger said a lot of businesses have a defensive intellectual property strategy focused almost exclusively on protecting their products, technology or brand name from infringers and defending the company from infringement suits.
“There’s kind of a gap, or disconnect between the value and importance of intellectual property in business and [the] amount of guidance and help there is for people in order to deploy it in the best way,” Goodger said.
The idea is to take an analytical, strategic approach to deciding which IP to protect and when and what IP-related deals to do and when, Goodger said. Examples of IP deals would include licensing and collaborating with other businesses, he said.
A lot of businesses just don’t know how to mix together their IP with what they want to do as a business, Goodger said. “We all believe that that IP protection, properly managed, can be a tremendously helpful asset to increase value and increase revenue.”
Goodger said the group’s core mission is to provide knowledge and resources to members. In the future, it’s interested in developing benchmarks of the level of IP protection or IP strategic approaches used in different industries.
It’s also considering developing some type of accreditation or certification that a variety of professionals such as consultants, accountants and lawyers could attain, Goodger said. “We want to build it up to be the gold standard of people who really understand all the issues, including legal issues, financial aspects, marketing aspects and internal company management aspects.”
“Part of our role is to raise the profile of this [concept] in business circles, academic circles and political circles,” Goodger said.
Goodger said the group doesn’t foresee itself as doing much political lobbying early on, but it does anticipate playing an advisory role in policy discussions.
In one early example, the association was asked to make a submission to the U.K. government-commissioned Hargreaves Report published earlier this month. The widely publicized report included a comment from Google Inc. that it could never have started in the United Kingdom because U.K. copyright law lacks provisions akin to the U.S. “fair use” provisions, which allow others to use copyrighted material in specific ways.
“The International IP Strategists Association was consulted on that,” Goodger said. “We made a submission and we believe our submission is being taken into account.”
“We see ourselves as an organization that would be consulted and would make a very useful contribution for those kind of debates,” Goodger said.
Sheri Qualters can be contacted at [email protected].
This article originally appeared in The National Law Journal.
