Strategy.manage.ent

James Robertson finds a helpful article for team leaders on the 3M Meeting Network. The text that goes along with each bullet point is worth reading if you're responsible for building or managing any group of people.

10 tips for shared purpose. Christopher M. Avery has written an article on 10 secrets to a shared purpose. This outlines some tips on how to build an effective and cohesive team:

Establish shared clarity
Select teammates for their motivation first, their skills second
Accept—once and for all—that teammates don't have to like each other
Stop trying to motivate
Determine if your team is "built."
Know your most powerful team member
Understand and honor the definition of consensus
Become a "fast team" by knowing how to arrive at decisions quickly
Don't fall into the "common enemy" trap
Reorient the relationship when productivity begins to lag [Column Two]

Utah CIO On The Value Of Silly Patents

8:30:23 PM

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I appreciate Phil Windley's view on silly patents given my recent study of same in the graphic arts. I suspect Windley is right that pursuing patent enforcement, especially of questionable methods and processes, is a costly endeavor and one that not many companies can withstand.

Of All the Stupid....
Yesterday I wrote about IM Bots. A pretty cool idea. Today I see in this Internet World article that ActiveBuddy has won a patent on the idea. I'm not a rabid anti-patent kind of guy, but this one seems pretty wimpy. There's plenty of prior art (like this Eliza IRC bot from June 1999). But whats more, small companies rarely win by having a patent. That's for IBM and other large companies who can employ hundreds of corporate attorneys. Even there most of them primarily use their patents defensively rather than offensively. The best way for a company like ActiveBuddy to win in the market is to spend their time and money on innovation, not in the courtroom.

I once had business dealings with a company called CoolSavings. They have a patent on online coupons. They spent so much time trying to convince us that we had to do business with them or they were going to come after us in court that we never did get to a business deal. I don't think its a smart way to do business.
[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

The Extortion Business Model

3:15:18 PM

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Cory's post on bogus patents is of interest because I have just been looking into a similar situation in the graphic arts.

Utterly bogus IMBot patent threatens entire field of innovation. When venture captial dries up, "innovative" companies like ActiveBuddy look for other revenue opportunities. In ActiveBuddy's case, the new money in the door will come from intimidating other technologists who ship instant-messaging bots, a concept on which the enemies of progress at the USPTO have just granted ActiveBuddy a patent. IM bots are an idea with well-known, invalidating prior art going back to well before the ActiveBuddy patent was filed. ActiveBuddy demonstrates its ignorance thus:
"I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I'm certainly not aware of any," said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy's chief technology officer. [...](via /.)
[Boing Boing Blog]

ImageX, of Kirkland, WA, fits Cory's description above quite well. Launched during the Dot Com bubble, the company has struggled since inception to find success with its e-procurement and e-commerce model, which it describes as follows:

ImageX (NASDAQ: IMGX) is a leading provider of Web-based services to streamline the management, production and distribution of business communication materials.
The company provides marketing automation and branded communication solutions that reduce the costs of revenue generating activities such as sales channel support, collateral fulfillment and marketing program management.

But now ImageX has a new plan -- they have applied for patents on close to 60 (some estimates are as high as 90) processes and methods for producing print materials. Three patents have been granted and, at last count, they have received a sixth Notice of Allowance.

The problem is these patents appear to be, at best, questionable -- covering ideas and methods which seem to be common and routine rather than any significant new technology or development. The business plan appears to be to get as many of these issues through the USPTO as possible, offer a handful of small firms extremely favorable license terms to establish commercial value, and then wage a legal battle against major players.

What this means for industry innovators is unclear, but when a company receives patents for seemingly basic processing of routine operations, it does not bode well for innovators. This could adversely affect any company trying to raise efficiency through automation. More importantly, it raises the spectre of greatly increased burdens to fight legal battles over infringement.

It is not clear from reading the ImageX patent data that they actually invented much of anything. Certainly nothing to justify the following claim, which openly states the company's new view of where its money will come from:

[...]"These two patents illustrate the uniqueness of our technology and our production process," said Rich Begert, president and CEO. "They are at the core of our patent portfolio, and with three remaining Notices of Allowance and 47 print-related patents pending, we expect to start monetizing our patent portfolio." [WhatTheyThink?]

As someone who specializes in process automation for the print industry (not patent law) I have to say this approach to business worries me, but I can't state it any more effectively than Cory:

[...]When you file a patent, you aver that you have disclosed all the potentially invalidating prior art you know about. I wonder if there's a basis for pursuing a fraud claim against the inventors whose names are on the patent, since it's hardly credible that they didn't know about all this invalidating prior art before they told the federal government that they'd never heard of any of these well-known technologies.[...] [Boing Boing Blog]

The USPTO does not seem competent to review patent applications in the graphic arts, despite the fact that is their job and there is no other agency so defined. But once these patents are on the books -- no matter how frivilous or unwarranted -- it is almost impossible to invalidate them. So this is an important issue for an industry that desperately needs to remain free to innovate.

ImageX' new revenue strategy may well be intimidation of big industry players for royalities. If so, it seems a risky bet for all concerned. But I would certainly like to see someone at a major industry provider -- with suitable legal resources -- take a thorough look at this before unwarranted patents get on the books.