Managing intellectual assets1 used to be a backwater, consigned to research laboratories and to dusty file drawers in the offices of patent attorneys. Insofar as such assets were managed at all, they were mostly managed defensively: after a company’s labs developed something new, the legal department would get a patent and try to ensure that third parties didn’t infringe on or otherwise misappropriate it.
Too often, hugely promising inventions were unused by the companies that owned them and, at the same time, off-limits to third parties that understood their true value. Moreover, some companies developed and patented devices and technologies less to exploit them commercially than to prevent competitors from doing so or to avoid undermining current businesses. Although the filing of a patent gave notice to third parties that might have been interested in using it, there was no intellectual-asset market where companies could buy what they needed or sell what they couldn’t commercialize themselves.
Most companies with research labs have produced valuable intellectual assets that languished because their creators didn’t recognize their value or lacked the ability or incentive to extract it. Perhaps the most notorious example is the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which...