On the agenda of every Practice Center of Excellence must be: “Implement and formalize IP identification and development”.
The first step in establishing a program of this type is to clearly understand the concept of “practice intellectual property” – keeping in mind that the “traditional” concept of IP is mostly outdated. Practice leadership must understand how to identify and embrace the “IP opportunities” that exist today based upon this new thought process.
New Concepts
Today the industry has evolved the concept of IP far beyond the idea of a “secret recipe”, algorithm or body of work and a talented practice leader will be able to leverage this “capital” into concrete value for the practice.
Originally, the objective was to “protect” something that was considered integral to maintaining the competitive advantage of an organization. Today, practice leaders know that the focus should be “cultivate and grow” not “protect and restrict”.
The Categories of Practice IP
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The Intellectual property of a practice will generally be categorized as human, relational or (the more traditional) structural.
Human
Human IP will be individuals or designated teams within the practice that possess “extreme” or “unique” skillsets, experiences of great depth or breadth or attitudes and aptitudes that represent the practice’s.
Identify, reward and nurture these resources! These individuals should mentor and promote their talents within the practice and should be marketed and promoted as part of the practice within the industry at conferences and with white papers and blogs.
Relational
Relational IP will exist within the practice in the form of key relationships with parties outside of the practice, the ability to access key individuals within the industry, customer contacts, vendor relationships and memberships, partnerships and organized groups. These relationships should be leveraged; network and introduce additional members of the practice to those industry leaders and vendors. Encourage practice members to become part of organized groups and affiliations. Solicit partners, customers and vendors to speak and present to the practice. Do “field trips” and “meet and greets” so the industry knows the team.
Structural
Structural IP is the most common kind of IP. This will be the actual program code, models or modules, design patterns, algorithms (possibly expressed only in pseudo code), policies, guidelines, advice, best practice templates and documents and/or tools and utilities.
There may seem to be more obvious advantages to this type of IP, so most practices will have some grasp of what the “value add potential” here is – but keep in mind” (1) don’t focus on anything that’s easier to recreate than reuse and (2) be forever mindful of the effort that may be required to inventory and support a large “library of IP”.
Educate and Promote
Not all organizations will initially embrace this new idea of “Practice IP”. It will be the role of the practice leader to educate and advocate to the executive team. Keep in mind again, that this will be a voyage with many challenges but well worth your efforts.
