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June 2001 | By Kim Ann Zimmermann
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Vital company documents are now routinely being shared via the Internet,
increasing the potential for theft of intellectual property. Knowledge management
systems are helping all types of companies, from software firms to traditional
manufacturers, manage access to documents that are at the core of their future
business plans. Companies are using KM systems to shield sensitive data from
prying eyes while providing the ability to freely share the information with
the appropriate people.
The applications for KM systems don’t stop at simply safeguarding intellectual
property. Since all types of vendors, particularly software providers and
pharmaceutical firms, are applying for a record number of patents, KM plays an
important role in helping to manage the process of new product development and
patent applications.
“We’re seeing content out there that is getting richer and richer, with
audio files and video being shared by business partners via the Web,”
says Tim Kounadis, VP of North American marketing for Hyperwave Information
Management (www.hyperwave.com).
“That leaves a lot of information out there and exposed.” Managing and protecting
all types of data is key to the future of KM systems in intellectual property
management applications.
Kounadis says, “The ability to have a knowledge management system support rich
media is very important. This is something we didn’t see that often even just
a few years ago. The Internet has changed all that. Now, we take video for granted.
It is all part of the mix.
“We see users like the advertising firm McCann-Erickson using collaborative
business-to-business Web portals. They have clients logging onto the server with
secure IDs and passwords to view creative documents, advertising copy as well as
[audio] and video files.”
Says Jim Hickey, VP of marketing for Authentica
(www.authentica.com),
“As we move from a manufacturing base, intellectual property becomes a vital
asset that needs to be protected and managed. But for that intellectual property to
gain value, it has to be shared. The issue is how do you protect your assets in
cases where you have to share the data. How do you prevent someone from walking
away with something of substantial value?”
“Companies have significant sums of revenue invested in intellectual capital
that they need to turn into financial capital.”
Managing data from a central location and assigning specific privileges
to each piece of information is crucial, according to Hickey. “You have
to specify a usage policy for each bit of information,” he says. “Who can
read it? Can they print it? Can they forward it? And how long can they have
the privileges for each specific document or file?” One of the biggest
challenges in managing intellectual property is to actually get the information
from the minds of the inventors and other knowledge workers into files that can
be shared and archived.
“If the knowledge is all in the minds of the inventors, it can no longer be
protected,” said Linda Fritzsche, VP of marketing for Delphion
(www.delphion.com). “We’ve seen such a
growth in patenting over the past 10 years. Just a few years ago, we had only
a few patents. Now companies are applying for thousands of patents a year.
They need to protect patents, trademarks, copyright material, know-how and
trade secrets. “Companies have significant sums of revenue invested in intellectual
capital that they need to turn into financial capital. But they can’t to do that
if they don’t capture that knowledge at the outset. If they can’t capture it, they
can’t leverage or protect it.”
One of the areas of growth in intellectual property management is using KM systems
to handle the internal process of bringing an idea for a new product or other
innovation from concept to fruition. Fritzsche points out that in a large company,
several departments simultaneously can develop similar ideas without the proper
systems in place for sharing knowledge.
“Having separate departments working on the same or similar ideas might be desirable
in some instances, but often it is not the most efficient use of company resources,”
she says. “One of the big areas for knowledge management is invention disclosure and
idea submission within a company. Companies are starting to focus on how to take these
thousands of inventors and harness their power. Workflow, knowledge management and
other technologies can facilitate extraction of this knowledge. They submit an idea,
and that idea is reviewed by groups of people scrutinizing it from business, technical
and legal aspects.”
As the business and technology teams assess the value and merit of the idea being
submitted, they must decide if they should pursue a patent, another process that
needs to be managed carefully, according to Fritzsche.
“Once they decide to develop an idea and apply for a patent, they have to protect
it. They have to lock it down,” she says.
Sharing knowledge among departments within an organization can stave off a potential
disaster when it comes time to make that information public.
“Quite often, an attorney sees a press release as it is ready to go out.
The attorney says, ‘Oh, my gosh. What do you mean we’re announcing this?’
By sharing well in advance, those kinds of problems can be reduced,” Fritzsche says.
One of the biggest problems in managing intellectual property is getting knowledge
workers to document their ideas.
Kounadis says, “One of the concerns has been how to motivate people in your
organization to use the knowledge management system. Not everything is going
to make it into the knowledge management system, but you have to try to capture
as much as you can. As older people retire, what happens to what they’ve learned
over their 25-year careers? You just need to try to document as much as you can.”
While it is important to gather as much data as possible concerning valuable
intellectual property, forcing knowledge workers to fill out online forms can
backfire, experts agree.
“There are really two conflicting forces at work,” says Scott Cooper, senior VP
of knowledge management for Lotus Development (www.lotus.com). “If you make me
fill in a form, it is destined to failure. A lot of organizations have tried that
and failed. But if you [gather information] in an automated fashion, people are
not sure they want the company crawling around their computer files.”
There needs to be a balance in how the information is gathered, Cooper suggests.
“What Lotus does is we’ll start to mine the information you put into [public areas]
and develop a profile of you, based on the things you’ve written and the projects
you’ve worked on,” he says.
Those user profiles are developed automatically and users are prompted to
“subscribe” to various conversations and exchanges based on the profiles.
“They can opt out if, for example, they know they worked on a one-time project
and aren’t interested in working on anything similar in the future,” says Cooper.
“We have a number of customers who have applied our technologies to maintaining a
record of research and notes regarding new inventions and patents. It is an
emerging trend. Companies are simply trying to answer the questions what do
we know, and who knows it.”
While sharing knowledge inside the organization is key, it is also important to
gather information on patents held by other companies.
“You don’t want to go through the whole process and have the patent office
tell you the idea is already patented,” Fritzsche says. “Even worse, you don’t
want to find out that the product you’re developing is already patented, and your
company owns the patent. There are significant sums of revenue in licensing
intellectual capital. The key is to turn the intellectual capital into financial
capital.”
Kim Ann Zimmermann is a freelance writer, 609-448-7509, e-mail
kimzimmermann@home.com.
Used with permission from KMWorld Magazine.
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