TRIPs

In IP Is Now Job One For Every Senior Executive (Forbes), Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt describe IP’s role for the modern business, echoing many of the themes we’ve been discussing here at ipVA, especially around IP and the need to move it as a forward-looking business issue. As you might expect, I whole-heartedly agree with all these points (and they’ve come up with some great quotes along the way).

In approaching these themes, they also expand on the role of IP at a national level, and in so doing compare IP to oil:

The U.S. is currently the Saudi Arabia of IP reserves. American companies control 33% of the world’s triadic patents… . By comparison, Saudi Arabia has only 20% of known oil reserves. And IP has an enormous beneficial impact on our balance and terms of trade.

Which incidentally make me wonder about where then lies IP’s “pipeline politics” – perhaps the evolution of TRIPs at the WTO? They also go on to compare the US position with its (supposed arch-rival in IP), China:

But the rest of the world is nipping at our heels. China, for example, is not content to serve as the world’s low-cost manufacturing hub. It has set its sights on IP as its next chief driver of economic progress. In 2007 the chief scientist for China’s Academy of Sciences, Niu Wenyuan, called intellectual property rights “the No. 1 strategic reserve in the 21st century” and added that their “significance is not inferior to any other strategic reserve, be it food or energy.”

Regardless of whether IP is as significant as energy or food, I do think that the “stuff” IP protects (call it intangibles or intellectual capital or just innovation) definitely makes a significant driver of growth for both individual companies and nations as a whole. China’s quite right to explicitly consider its role internationally. Indeed, innovation is one of the great strengths of UK plc, and unlike oil, the UK has significant reserves: So let’s go about getting better at recognising, exploiting and protecting it.

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