As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked David French, a senior Canadian patent attorney with 35 years of experience, to discuss the importance to a company of protecting its IP and how creating the position of “IP Coordinator” can facilitate the process. This is the second of David’s commentaries and we welcome your comments.
By David French
In my previous post, I addressed the importance of a company’s intellectual property and how it can contribute to the bottom line, negatively or positively. In this post, I address the issue of how intellectual property is being managed within your organization.
Who in your organization knows or is able to understand all of the issues and requirements in order to ensure that you have good IP hygiene? Frankly, many companies just assume their lawyer is going to look after these issues. Well, your lawyer may provide advice in the boardroom, or possibly even in a reporting letter, as to many of the things you should do in order to keep your intellectual property regime in order. But who will remember all of this?
This is where the concept of an Intellectual Property Coordinator becomes important.
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By Linda Forrest
Whenever the concept of influence comes up, I’m immediately confronted with a mental image of Will Farrell positing that he’s “kind of a big deal,” a memorable and oft-quoted line from the raunchy comedy Anchorman. The irony is that in the film, he is, as stated, kind of a big deal. The same is true of influencers, tastemakers, trendsetters or whatever term best describes people whose opinions and actions hold weight amongst your target market.
There is an entire discipline of marketing devoted to this concept called “influencer marketing.” Wikipedia describes it as:
a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.
Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, or they may be third parties. These third parties exist either in the supply chain (retailers, manufacturers, etc.) or may be so-called value-added influencers (such as journalists, academics, industry analysts, professional advisers, and so on.)
A key takeaway is that influence is most effective when it’s not overtly used to deliver a specific result. Rather, influencers affect their markets without necessarily using certain tactics or well-defined parameters to do so. This distinction is what makes the concept of influence measurement so compelling.
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This is the eighth article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“A startup is ultimately … not just about whether an idea or a product works, it is about whether or not you can create a business around it. Whether or not the ecosystem will support it, the customers will buy it, if the channels will support it, and if the manufacturers will actually create it. And because of that, we need to be able to test all these different facets of our business model, and do so quickly.”
This comes from someone Forbes calls “the most powerful woman in startups,” Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner with FLOODGATE. In October, she gave a lecture at Stanford University titled “Funding Thunder Lizard Entrepreneurs,” which is filled with so much insight we were tempted to just transcribe the whole damned thing and offer it up as a blog post of its own. However, her talk is available as a conveniently indexed webcast.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a community manager, I admit I am rather biased when it comes to explaining the value of online communities, so I promise to do my best to be both balanced and accurate as I weigh their merits and demerits. If you’re reading this post, you’ve likely already heard the hoopla about how bustling and engaged online communities can be valuable for businesses. What you may not know is how they can be specifically beneficial to you, the entrepreneur in the ever-crucial stages of developing a startup when budgets are low and time is precious.
A common misconception that many people have about social media is that it is free. Sure, the platforms on their own don’t cost a nickel. But if the intention is to use them for business, they require a considerable level of resources, especially human resources required to develop a strategy and then to carry out online activities. You need to have a crystal-clear understanding of your goals and the processes through which you will achieve those goals for your investment in social media to be worthwhile. Trust me, social media is no light undertaking to be considered in passing. Do not idly throw this position on someone who already has 10 other responsibilities just because he or she has a Twitter account. Someone with a firm grasp on how to plan social media activities to achieve business goals should be in charge of building online communities to ensure you do not waste your valuable time, energy, money and reputation on a trial-and-error approach.
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By Francis Moran
When I launched this blog a little over six weeks ago, I said that I wanted to overturn the myths that surround the marketing of new technology products and services. I acknowledged at the time that many engineering-focused executive teams at technology ventures are leery of what they see as the black art of marketing. I also said I can forgive them for their skepticism — after all, as I wrote then, we marketers don’t do a good enough job of demonstrating just how marketing works and why they should invest in it — but I have a tougher time forgiving others who have weighed in over the past couple of weeks with simplistic and downright erroneous comments against marketing.
The worst part is, many of these insults were self-inflicted injuries inflicted on the marketing profession by some of its own.
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What your business can learn from Chilean wine
March 16, 2011 by Phil Newman
Yield management involves the strategic control of inventory to sell it to the right customer at the right time for the right price. Book your flight to New York two days before you’re due to fly and you’ll get the idea of purchasing at the top-end. Rather than considering late booking as a negative, why not apply airline pricing to your business to create demand among early buyers, or early adopters? […]
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Driving social media policy: how to avoid a PR disaster like Chrysler’s
March 15, 2011 by Linda Forrest
Last week, Chrysler experienced a PR crisis when a Tweeter at its social media agency posted a Tweet that not only used an expletive, but was completely off brand. From a marketing perspective, this came at a very bad time for the company, which had made a splash with its “imported from Detroit” campaign, launched at the SuperBowl […]
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Is that person in the mirror standing between you and success?
March 14, 2011 by Francis Moran
“Nothing disheartens me more than meeting an entrepreneur in B.C. who says his ambition is to one day conquer the Ontario market,” Anthony Lee, general partner at Altos Ventures and co-founder of the C100, told us in an interview a few months back.
While building a globally competitive company […]
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Are you making the most of your communications people?
March 11, 2011 by Caroline Kealey
Decision-making executives in a variety of sectors often fail to recognize the value their communications people bring to their organization. Often, this arises because the communicators themselves have not adequately conveyed the value they provide in a way that resonates with management. As a senior decision maker, you can make a powerful shift in your thinking by […]
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Gamification: The new marketing frontier
March 10, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
I know what you’re thinking because it’s what I was thinking before I went to this event: “What the heck does the gaming industry have to do with marketing?” Coming out of the event, I am not only intrigued by the psychology of “gamification,” the tactics of engagement and how it could be incorporated into a marketer’s communications strategy […]
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Incubation: Whose job is it, anyway?
March 09, 2011 by Francis Moran
“Government doesn’t start companies,” Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech, told us a little while back. “Individuals do.”
Nonetheless, government does have an important role to play in the value chain of bringing technology to market […]
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Hug an entrepreneur
March 08, 2011 by Andrew Penny
A lot has been said about creating an Innovative Culture. Research labs, government departments and agencies are all trying to figure out just how to make us innovate. The thought being that innovation equals wealth creation. However, to create this wealth someone has to do something with the innovation, someone who is prepared to take the risk that things may not work out quite as planned […]
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Google is your homepage: Startup steps to SEO
March 07, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
To break the ice at a recent IABC Ottawa event that dealt with measuring online marketing, Alex Langshur, President of PublicInsite, displayed the Google homepage on an overhead and asked the audience what it was. People shouted out the obvious answers like, “That’s Google of course,” and, “It’s a search engine,” but no one was able to provide Langshur the answer he was looking for […]
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By David French
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The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]