IPStudies celebrates its first year of activity on September 1st, 2011 – launching a brand new web site to more dynamically promote new services and partnerships – those that can be disclosed 😉 -, as well as breaking news and publications.
The blog part has been entirely revisited to facilitate publishing and referencing, and hopefully also improve your reader experience.
So, let’s start evaluating this with the first year birthday virtual speech!
When I decided to create my own job in 2010, I was unsure what it would drive me into. I only knew my former high-tech management job no longer inspired me, to the extent there was no other choice possible than changing it.
I had long projected myself into a consulting activity; so I decided to start from there.
“Do what you like to do, and it will work“, I was told by an advisor; so I decided to go that way.
That sounds easy, right? Well, it isn’t. Do you really know what you like to do? You can look at what you are used to do, and what makes you pleased, but what you *really* like to do may be something else. It cannot be explained; you have to find it on your own. Over this first year of freelance activity, I confirmed my personal drivers as:
- learning, and
- helping others.
I had plenty of opportunities to do both in the past 12 months. I further learnt about a number of other technologies beyond my former expertise fields of digital TV and security, but also about economics, entrepreneurship and technology valuation, and I helped several customers and partners sort out various technologies to better valuate them or optimize their IP investment in protecting them:
- Identifying what can be protected and above all what is worth formally protecting along a technology development.
- Analyzing and optimizing the technology position against prior art for a stronger protection.
- Extracting unique selling propositions from a technology package and preparing licensing marketing material for patent portfolio valuation.
- Acquiring tips and tricks in IP management to integrate the IP factor as closely as possible to their technology development… learning from me, so that they can do it on their own.
And this even left me enough free time to explore different fields on my own – that’s the advantage of managing your own time. Over this winter, I became more and more interested into economics and market information, social sciences and history. And I started to take a closer look at crowd-sourcing, open innovation and web2.5+ ideas. In parallel, I revisited recent works in patent analytics beyond the former study work I had completed in 2008 to post-graduate from IEEPI and the University of Strasbourg in strategic management of intellectual property and innovation, and I started to develop a new service – check the IP Studies section to learn more.
Lastly, when I saw the Economist-Innocentive Human Potential Index Challenge call for proposals in May, I thought it was the occasion for me to try and write down a synthesis of my own converging ideas in that field, as I was starting to connect what I had learnt from a number of different works from a diversity of fields into something that seemed to be new, and possibly interesting – who knows?
To my surprise, the “creative sharing index“ I submitted, proposing to measure the impact and influence of creative works as they spread and get interactively enriched (or not!) in our societies, has been selected as the winner, with a reward of $10000 plus the incredible opportunity to go present it and further discuss the future of work at The Economist’s second annual Ideas Economy: Human Potential conference on Sept 14th-15th at the Times Center in New York City (Based on a series of live events from The Economist, The Ideas Economy attracts a community of active participants from business, government, non-profits and the academy who are interested in collaborating to solve global challenges, develop new ideas, and contribute to human progress).
And there are even more ideas and opportunities in the pipe for the second year of activity… so, keep posted!