I’m with you all the way. There seems to me to be a bit of a challenge for people who are knowledge workers, to understand what IP represents in their area. For people who ultimately produce concrete objects it is much easier.

For those people who are in between – especially designers – I can see huge potential for frustration because many ‘inventors’ don’t appreciate the value of design to the translation of their ideas into practice.

Thanks for commenting – much appreciated.
Best wishes
Graham

When your average business exec, not trained in creative development, comes up with an idea, they tend to become fixated on it and imagine it’s the most valuable thing in the world. In fact ideas are two-a-penny and are pretty much worthless until they’re developed, proven, protected and backed.

Imagining intellectual property as like real bricks and mortar property, gives you a better sense of it’s real value. Something which you’ve just knocked together in 30 seconds in your head contrasts sharply with something a drug company has spent 7 years and 2 billion quid developing, testing, refining, proving and protecting.

For example as product designers we’re trained to create and deal with ideas all the time. I’ve just been looking through an old project folder for a new product that an inventor is launching now. This folder contains a 3″ thick stack of sketching on A3 paper. This must include at least 1,000 different ideas and solutions in there that we have come up with, assessed, rejected or incorporated, built up through five stages of design and testing to make up the eventual design. There were many times during that project when I was lying awake at night trying to work through ideas to get things to work. And the final design – looks as simple as you could imagine – and no one outside the design team would ever understand the mental anguish we went through to make it that simple.

That is intellectual property.

1) Make sure my ‘affairs’ were in order so that I wasn’t leaving too much of a mess for my partner/family etc. Shouldn’t take too long
2) Meditate, reflect and celebrate this life-time
3) Either call or write to anyone for whom I wanted to express deep gratitude
4) Take a walk and smell the flowers, listen to birdsong and cloud-gaze
5) Meditate and breathe my way peacefully to the next phase of the journey…

Somehow I think my ‘last day’ will look very different!!

Best wishes
Graham.