“Growing organization in any fields must instantly evolve, accept or even seek new ideas new visions and new enthusiasm.”
- J.R.D Tata
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
- Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein’s preference for imagination over knowledge is the starting point for every innovative breakthrough. The history of the human race is a history of applying imagination, innovation, and creativity to existing knowledge in order to solve problems. From early writings in Mesopotamia, the Chinese abacus, ancient observatories in India, the Guttenberg printing press, the internal combustion engine, and countless other discoveries and innovations, the imagination of creators has driven humanity to today’s level of high-tech progress.
Innovation and Its Importance
The field of innovation and exploring the aspects that help create sustainable innovative products requires an understanding of the need for innovation.
The new age start-ups, small and medium-scale enterprises, and even large entities, especially those governed by traditional values, struggle to change the culture of their business. When it comes to innovation, we are experiencing a growing number of disruptive innovators who are challenging the existence of traditional organizations and forcing them to reconsider their responses to the changing dynamic. Businesses like Swiggy, Zomato, Oyo, Ola, and Uber are the new practices that have evolved as disruptive innovators in the Corporate World.
Successful organizations with a strong culture of innovation, which were start-ups a few years ago like Amazon and Facebook, have developed into high-tech companies because of their strong culture of innovation. They have worked hard to maintain the small start-up mentality with which they began in the early days. Initiatives like Google’s well-documented “20% Time” and similar concepts have helped entrepreneurs maintain an innovative mind-set among employees, leading to development and growth.
There are two important questions that one should ask themselves: why do we need to innovate?, and what do we hope to achieve from innovation?
The following bullet points provide answers to these questions:
- Solving customer problems
- Attracting new customers
- Entering new markets
- Creating new products
- Building Brand Awareness
- Developing a global presence.
Innovation Process
Business problems create a need for a solution, which drives the business and product development processes. During this process, ideas are generated. When these ideas are manifested as a product, they become a source of intellectual property. This intellectual property can be a major differentiator for your enterprise. The Intellectual Property process itself stimulates further innovation, so protecting these differentiators through Intellectual Property is critical for sustainability.
Innovation, Differentiation, And Commodification
By innovating, you are creating something new, which can happen at any level within a business. Innovation does not always involve breakthrough technology. It can be in branding, business methods like IKEA, or any other operations that help a business do things better, faster, smarter, and more efficiently. Innovation is crucial for long-term viability and competitiveness. It leads to product differentiation and adds creative value, as seen in examples like Hindustan Unilever’s product Fair and Lovely, which has maintained its competitive edge for almost 30 years.
The product/services differentiator, if established, can help any enterprise position itself to take advantage of differentiation and create more value through sustainable products/services. Product or service differentiation can help companies avoid commodification, which is the process of treating a good or service as an undifferentiated commodity.
Commodification is the intentional process of commoditizing goods or services, as seen with Nokia’s inability to differentiate its products, resulting in their handsets becoming commodities when smartphones were introduced. Intellectual property has strategy for innovation
What is Strategy??
Until the middle of the last century, it was believed that strategy is a tool of management. Many enterprises and organizations failed to define and understand how strategy can be helpful for the growth of an organization. In reality, strategies are all about making specific choices to win the game of business. According to Prof Michael Porter, Harvard Business School, “Strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely position an organization in its industry to create a sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.”
Intellectual Property Strategy is an essential component of a comprehensive business strategy. Therefore, strategy should not be dictated by policy, but rather should align with the goals of an organization, while policy should serve as a tool for implementing the strategy in place.
The competitive landscape, technology capabilities, size, and maturity of a business play a key role in determining the Intellectual Property strategy. This contributes to the development of effective models for extracting Intellectual Property value or creating innovative business strategies for growth. Intellectual Property strategy is not set in stone and should be adapted in order to achieve sustainability goals. It can be utilized to assess the freedom to operate within the technological realm of the company’s business and industry. A good Intellectual Property strategy should closely align with a well-developed business strategy.
The Intellectual Property Strategy should primarily focus on the role that Intellectual Property plays for a business within the organization, including its legal and commercial implications.
CASE STUDY
DR REDDY’S SUCCESS IN INDIA
Dr. K. Anji Reddy’s Group has rapidly expanded to become an international pharmaceutical company, providing high-quality and cost-effective pharmaceutical products to markets worldwide. Dr. Reddy’s research Foundation (DRF) was established in 1993 with the purpose discovering new therapies. Since 1994, DRF has discovered and developed several new chemical entities in various areas. Three have formulated and two have already been licensed to the Danish pharmaceutical company, Novo Nordisk, in a landmark agreement which earned DRF the distinction of being the first Indian company to license its discoveries to a foreign multinational.
The deal provided Novo Nordisk with an exclusive worldwide license (excluding India) to develop and market pharmaceutical products, based on compounds discovered and patented by DRF, in return for upfront milestone payments and royalties to DRF.
DRF attributes much of its success to patent protection. Dr. Reddy firmly believes that the economic success of companies and countries can be measured in terms of patent filings.
DRF has established an in-house intellectual property management group to oversee all international patent filings and matters relating to patent strategy.[1]
[1] Intellectual Property – A power tool for economic growth by Kamil Idris