by: Tom Hochstatter, President

Just over a week ago we announced our “official” entrance into the growing IP Advisory and Consulting space and the hiring of industry veteran, Dan Spaeth to lead our teams. Truth be told, Techson has been providing strategic IP consulting services to its Am Law 100 and F500 clients for some time now - it was and has been a general function of the services we provide clients on a daily basis.

But, what had been missing was our opportunity to provide such IP consulting feedback and then further participate in our clients’ ongoing IP and patenting efforts within their enterprise. We saw that providing a strategic answer to a tactical inquiry (e.g. “please conduct a freedom-to-operate report for our upcoming major product announcement.”) was not giving them complete (nor competitively advantaged) insights. By not fully understanding the client’s long term strategy and competitive ambitions we felt we couldn’t provide our best work and insights.

We also saw that traditional management consulting and strategic consulting firms lack the in depth understanding of IP and how it deeply relates to their clients’ enterprise. Frankly, it is simple to see in the output they created - wonderful graphical representation of a portfolio, glossy and ready for C-Suite and BOD consumption, but it says nothing of the questions those audiences are about to ask: “What is my risk/advantage with our IP portfolio?”, “How do we stack up to the competition?”, “If I have this risk/advantage what are we doing about?”, “Can you execute on the decisions we make today?”.

Without details expertise in IP the analysis and recommendations will fall flat, or worse provide the wrong advice and require those clients to seek yet more service providers to help with their plans.

So we’ve hired Dan to reengage with our existing clients and seek new clients that view intellectual property, innovation and patenting as the strategic advantage that it truly is. Long gone are the days that IP and patents are “nice to have” especially when we are seeing massive convergence zones of technology and non-traditional enterprises (autonomous vehicles, grocery/retail and last mile deliver or data mining, big oil migrating to green/clean energy, etc.).

Our leadership in IP Advisory has been recognized. Last week, IAM Media reported on this as a trend to watch and recently we’ve seen others make major moves into the space with traditional management consultants tying up with IP Advisory firms.

Our difference is that we have and will partner with outside counsel vs. trying to compete in or fragment an already wildly fragmented IP services industry: counsel has legal expertise in addition to deep portfolio expertise, and most importantly - privilege. And the legal services industry, too, is struggling to find compelling differentiated services, so our partnership with them is very synergistic.

This way we bring clients the best of three worlds: legal, management consulting expertise and IP execution capabilities spanning the entire Innovation Supply Chain. It’s a triple bottom line win.

#ipadvisory

#ipconsulting

#limestone