Procter & Gamble’s
Enviado por PIA1727 • 24 de Febrero de 2013 • 2.001 Palabras (9 Páginas) • 581 Visitas
decade ago, Procter & Gamble’s paper-towel production line in Albany,
Georgia, used to jerk to an unexpected stop more than a hundred times
daily, costing the company thousands of dollars each time in wasted product
and lost production time. To solve the problem, P&G developed a suite of
sophisticated technical and statistical tools that not only helped managers
predict such assembly line snafus but also prevent them. This “reliability engineering”
technology has given the company an important competitive advantage
over rivals, as it has helped P&G boost manufacturing efficiency by more
than a third and save billions of dollars in the years since it was introduced.
It came as quite a surprise, therefore, when Procter & Gamble announced
in the summer of 2000 that it would henceforth license this same technology
to any and all bidders — including its own competitors. The company is
known, after all, for being fiercely protective of its proprietary innovations
(witness the forced bankruptcy of rival diaper-maker Paragon Trade Brands
in 1998 after P&G won a patent suit against it). Yet suddenly P&G was offering
(for a price) to share with other companies not only its reliability-engineering
tools but its entire stock of 28,000 technology patents as well.
Although Procter & Gamble’s decision stumped industry analysts at the
time, the company’s move is actually part of a larger trend (see also Henry
Chesbrough’s article, “The Era of Open Innovation,” p. 35). P&G, in fact, is
only one of a small but growing number of Fortune 500 firms such as IBM,
BellSouth, Boeing, Rohm and Haas, and Motorola that are moving away from
a strict reliance on the “exclusivity value” of their patents and other intellectual
property — that is, their power to exclude or hinder competitors — and
are instead seeking to tap the often-enormous financial and strategic value of
their core technology assets by licensing them to other companies, including
competitors. The practitioners of this strategic licensing, as it is called, are betting
that any loss of market exclusivity that may result from making available
their “crown jewel” technologies will be more than offset by the financial and
strategic benefits gained.
Mining the Value of Intellectual Property
Strategic licensing is emerging against the backdrop of intensified
efforts by corporate America to maximize the return on its intellectual
property assets, which now account for 50% to 70% of the
market value of all public companies.1 Patent licensing, for example,
has become a growth business — revenues have skyrocketed
from only $15 billion annually a decade ago to more than $100
billion today2— as companies have sought to tap the value lying
fallow in the 70% to 80% of corporate technology assets that typically
never get used in core products or lines of business.3
Until recently, companies either limited their licensing to
technologies that were not central to their main business or
licensed core technologies only to companies in noncompeting
industries. P&G’s licensing of an enzyme used in Tide to a contact
lens maker for use as a nonabrasive lens cleaner is a good
example of the latter. But with pressure mounting on companies
to shore up their recession-battered bottom lines by any and all
means, executives have now turned their attention to the stored
value within their organizations’ crown-jewel technologies.
The strategy is not without risk. “It’s a delicate balancing act
in which the business case varies in each situation,” says Daniel
M. McGavock, managing director of intellectual-property consulting
firm InteCap, which helps Fortune 500 companies execute
licensing and other IP “value realization” programs. “On the
one hand, you don’t want to abandon your patents’ ability to
exclude competitors from your market. But on the other hand,
you could be talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in
new revenue from strategic licensing, not to mention a host of
strategic benefits.” The challenge, he says, is to ensure that any
strategic-licensing effort is undertaken only with the utmost care.
“Companies must have a rigorous process in place,” says
McGavock, “that enables them to evaluate quantifiably both the
risks and costs as well as the potential benefits of any strategiclicensing
initiative for the whole enterprise.”
To judge from the results of such initiatives to date, the most
powerful benefits are economic. No company demonstrates this
...