CRISPR: creation, commercialisation and conflict
April 22 2015 In 1976 Herb Boyer, a University of California, San Francisco professor, and Robert Swanson, an unemployed venture capitalist, founded Genentech. The…
Napster reborn?
June 17 2015 A wise and pithy client once told me that if I wanted to get her business, I should identify a problem that was so irritating that she would be…
Patents as an asset class: the law of unintended consequences
June 24 2015 Intellectual property finds itself in a precarious position when described as an asset class. Whatever truth was living in that classification has…
Picassos in the cemetery
February 18 2015 Globally, around 120,000 businesses fail every day. The failure rate by country and by industry varies greatly, but a rule of thumb in the United…
A new golden age?
July 15 2015 Henry Ford once famously said, "If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse.'" This philosophy was a…
NPEs: the second bounce of the ball
January 13 2016 In a December 31 2015 article I analysed why the current responses of non-practising entities (NPEs) to the failure of their core strategy were…
IP value for investors: pulchritudo in oculo conspicientis est
December 9 2015 All original art is unique. By definition, everything original that was ever painted, sculpted, written or sung is the result of the inspiration and…
Manage your intellectual property - but account for it too
November 18 2015 Valeant is an aggregator of drugs run by a former McKinsey consultant and backed by hedge funds. In this respect, it is not your typical…
IP investing on the road from zero to one: part two
September 16 2015 Over the past decade, as demand for photographic film plummeted, Eastman Kodak Co went bankrupt, sold its intellectual property in a fire sale and is…
IP investing on the road from zero to one: part one
September 9 2015 PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel recently described the two competing economic paradigms for growth. These are: horizontal growth…
Fraserburgh
