Insights from the LES 2018 Annual Meeting


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Our team members Kim Ayers, Danny Soltan, and Bob Miller recently attended the LES 2018 Annual Meeting, which, conveniently, took place here in Boston. LES is the Licensing Executives Society; this was the meeting of its members based in the U.S. and Canada. The group and its members “maintain a commitment to the development and protection of IP Commerce.”

[click_to_tweet tweet=”A few team members recently attended the LES 2018 Annual Meeting. Read their takeaways from @LESUSACanada meeting. Read their takeaways on IP & partnership deals, the keynote, ‘Negotiating the Impossible’, and more. http://bit.ly/2zwFiiV” quote=”Valid and clear ownership of IP is paramount and should be considered and settled prior to working out the details of an acquisition or licensing deal.” theme=”style3″]

 

The agenda included a wide-range of topics, including exploring the general state of innovation and competitiveness in America, Boston’s perspective on funding startups, advanced telecommunications licensing LTE for automobiles, real world IP due diligence, accessing early innovation through open and external innovation models, IIoT and enabling a surge in industrial productivity, patenting and commercializing machine learning, best practices in license portfolio management, balancing the view points of licensors and licensees, maximizing IP value and minimizing IP risk in M&A transactions, driving consumer product value through innovation and licensing, and many more.

Our team was particularly interested in some takeaways involving IP and partnership deals. These include:

  • Valid and clear ownership of IP is paramount and should be considered and settled prior to working out the details of an acquisition or licensing deal. There’s only so much you can do to confirm the validity/strength of patents, so make sure the deal doesn’t rely solely on the patents and is diversified with other forms of value.
  • Anticipate all possible worst-case scenarios in partnerships and have solutions outlined in the contract.
  • Have the contract state who will own any co-developed technology. Separate it by territory, market, application, etc.
  • Never assign joint ownership of a patent. Have one company own the patent and the other company license it.

Here are the team’s collective thoughts on two specific sessions:

Keynote: Negotiating the Impossible, Deepak Malhotra, Harvard Business School

Deepak Malhotra is the Eli Goldston Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His keynote presentation was based on his book, Negotiating the Impossible, which was chosen as the “#1  Business Book of 2016” by KnowSquare and was listed among the
“Top 10 Business Books of 2016” by The Globe & Mail.

Malhotra’s tips on negotiating included:

  • Your greatest source of leverage is your ability to create value
  • Focus on what happens to them if you can’t reach a deal
  • Make it safe for the other party to change course
  • Write their victory speech for them
  • Help them save face
  • Ignore ultimatums, or reframe them into non-ultimatums
  • Seek to understand the reasons for their words and actions
  • Don’t just prepare your arguments, prepare your audience
  • Negotiate process before substance

Digital Health: The Intersection of Life Sciences and Technology

The panelists for this discussion included Travis Coy, vice president of corporate business development, Eli Lily; Kamal Jethwani, senior director, Connected Health Innovation, Partners HealthCare; and Manoja Ratnayake Lecamwasam, executive director, Dignity Health Intellectual Property Office.

Healthcare is moving towards more and more digital services as both a way to offer improved care and to improve the delivery of medication. Big pharmaceuticals and large healthcare providers are all trying to navigate this new landscape of digital health. For example, Eli Lilly opened a Cambridge Innovation Center in Greater Boston in 2016, which enables the company to “work with leading life-science, device and technology companies and organizations to explore emerging technologies.” One of the challenges facing pharmaceuticals in their digital transformations is the speed of business. Traditionally, as an industry, pharmaceuticals are accustomed to slow innovation cycles, on the order of years. Compare that to the digital health and wearables industry, which has an expectation of innovation cycles that are six months to one year, and sometimes even less.

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