Protection of Intellectual Property in the Supply Chain

April 10, 2024

“Crystal Palace” Dickinson Brothers Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 Hyde Park

The Licensing Executives Society is an ANSI accredited standards developer that empowers, connects, and celebrates intellectual property professionals through education, best practices, networking, participating and mentoring — i.e. the classic non-profit trade association business model. The work of LES should be of interest to the education industry which regards itself as the primary source of new knowledge.[1]

From the LES mission statement:

Across the world, innovation is the principal source of differentiated and defensible competitive advantage for individuals and enterprises. Innovation is the basis of advantaged products and services, and it drives sales and profits. It is the source of jobs. It is the engine of the global economy. Yet the intricacies of IC management are not well-understood by our political, financial, and business leaders.

In addition, in business schools around the world, IC management is not treated seriously as a business subject. In fact, to the extent it is dealt with at all, IC management is taught as a legal subject, not as the management of the largest component of value in the modern enterprise (i.e. 80 percent of the equity value of publicly traded companies). IC valuation, the business processes employed in IC management (both risk mitigation and value extraction), IC sharing and protection with third parties, and IC strategy are barely touched upon.

IC and its value are, therefore, nearly invisible to most of our business, financial, and political leaders and thinkers. They have little, if any, grounding in it. There is little accounting for it. And very often, no one outside the legal department has explicit responsibility for its protection and management.

We do not advocate in the LES suite but we track its best practice discovery. It is time well spent, following the action in educational units finding, and bringing to market, new knowledge.

“The Palace of Art and Industry 1862” | W.E. Hodgkin

Last year LES posted notice of public consultation on another title in its bibliography: Management System for the Protection of Intellectual Property in the Supply Chain. From the project prospectus:

This standard defines a common set of expectations for what organizations can and should do to protect all types of their own IP and the IP of customers, suppliers, and partners. The Committee’s vision is to achieve standardization around how organizations develop and implement an intellectual property protection management system. This standard seeks to supplement legal and contractual IP protection methods through performance standards and business processes and practices that define the management systems required to protect all types of intellectual property (IP) in the global supply chain. The LES Standards Development Organization encourages IP thought leaders around the globe to participate in the public review and comment of LES draft standards as part of the standardization development process. As an Accredited Standards Developer of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), LES provides the 60-day public review period to encourage manufacturers, distributors, and any interested stakeholder to represent each organization’s best interests while helping to shape this field for the future.

~~The public consultation window closed May 26th.~~

We have no information about its status as of this posting; a common condition among non-profit standards setting organizations since March. We expect that when any LES title is in motion it will announced on the link below:

LES Standards Home Page

Most research universities compete to be recognized as the new knowledge leader and have substantial intellectual property protection enterprises to harvest licensing revenue. These universities have large marketing units to make the accomplishments of its staff known to the public. The number of staff involved in marketing and administration may exceed the number of staff creating new knowledge.

We encourage innovation and technology management enterprises in the education industry to communicate directly with the Licensing Executives Society about participation and/or membership. Contact: Kelli Baxter, (703) 234-4088, kbaxter@les.org, 12100 Sunset Hills Road, Suite 130, Reston, VA 20190. We maintain the LES suite on the standing agenda of our Human Resource teleconferences. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.