The 2021 IPBC Global event was held in Seattle, Washington from November 14-16th. This event brought together the world’s IP business leaders to discuss the key challenges facing those responsible for developing current and future IP business strategies. Michael Taylor and Jake Sweeney represented ktMINE at the event and have provided their takeaways.
Day 1
The 2021 IPBC Global event was ktMINE’s first event back in person since covid-19 and coincidentally it was our last event of 2019. It felt great to reconnect with familiar faces and meet many new IP business leaders during the welcome reception held on Sunday.Â
After the welcome party, we walked over to Pike Place Market to get some Pike Place Chowder before calling it a night.
Day 2
We kicked off Monday by attending Enabling our Intelligently Connected Future with 5G Advanced on the Path to 6G with keynote speaker Tingfang Ji, Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm. Tingfang discussed how today we have partially distributed AI. However, in the future, we will be fully distributed AI with the help of 5G/6G via ultra-low latency connection from AI on your phone to AI in the cloud. With 5G/6G, Tingfang said that we can expect remote surgery, manufacturing improvements, connected classrooms, and remote learning.
After learning more about the future of 5 & 6G, we attended Lessons from the Global Pandemic: Improving for Tomorrow, where the speakers discussed how the pandemic caused supply chain issues. Jako Eleveld, Head of IP Licensing at Philips spent some time sharing their challenges when it came to delivering ventilators as well as the steps they took to meet the demand.
During this session, the panelists discussed how teleconferencing and Zoom are affecting business relationships. On the positive side, it has helped to expedite previously developed relationships by allowing for more meetings in less time through the elimination of travel. Which helped to facilitate licensing deals more effectively. However, the panel members were not so sure that this can be sustained because in-person meetings are necessary to develop trust and build new relationships. In the future, they believe we will need to get back to in-person meetings to develop new relationships. However, during the pandemic, teleconferencing allowed them to develop more deals with existing relationships.
That being said, panel members also mentioned a few ways teleconferencing improved communication between teams. Some of those internal processes developed during the pandemic will be kept in the future since they worked so well. For example, John Han at Qualcomm mentioned how his team changed an internal annual meeting into an iterative teleconferencing meeting spread out over months and saw much better results.
The last session we attended on Monday was Diversity Equity & Inclusion: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. The biggest takeaway from this session was that the first step you need to take is assessing where your company is at in terms of diversifying inventors. David Andrews, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at AON developed a tool to help companies track their inventions and find out how their inventors are broken down in terms of gender. Taking it even further, there were talks of future iterations that would allow mapping gender to patent quality and truly understand the positive impact that diversified inventors can bring to the table. Diversifying inventors could be a driver to more creativity and bring out the best innovation that a company can offer.
Day 3
On the final day of the event, we attended The Future of IP Investment. This session focused on the rise of litigation finance. Throughout this session, the five panelists discussed how NPEs and Law Firms use litigation finance to advance their businesses, not just for gaining litigation capital but to minimize risk across litigation, and to accelerate the growth of business for NPEs.
Overall, the 2021 IPBC Global event was a success. We were able to attend a number of sessions and network with several IP business leaders at our booth. We left with a better picture of the future IP landscape and we are already working on new, innovative ways to support ktMINE users based on our discussions. If we missed you this year, reach out to learn more about ktMINE.
