Competitive Advantage (15.390, Wednesday, Week 8)
new-enterprisesyear-twoThomas Edison's greatest invention was the research lab --- an efficient methodology for making good ideas into marketable technology products.
Save $5K on lawyers now...pay $5M to reinforce your poorly-planned intellectual property bulwarks later.
At A123, Yet-Ming Chiang took a one-year sabbatical from MIT to patent tech. Defensible IP enabled the firm to raise capital and build mammoth infrastructure to produce batteries. Without defensive patent portfolio, investors would've stayed away --- even though incumbents never seriously pursued legal action AND patents had zero impact on execution.
Think about how important IP will be. Sometimes critical, sometimes not...