What other ways can managers protect the value of their intellectual property, besides patenting?
Hal: The important point here is that a companys goal should not be to protect their intellectual property, but to capture as much value from it as possible. One example we use is Adobe, who developed a really good page description language. Because there are some network externalities in the market for document creationa document standard is more valuable the more readers that can view the documentsAdobe released a big chunk of their product. But they also had an implementation that was superior to the competitions, and this allowed them to keep a few little aspects of the technology for themselves and capture the value of those components. Carl: It is a delicate issue, how much control you maintain over a standard versus how open it is. They maintained control over the standardization of their format, but they did not maintain control over other people’s implementations. Hal: And of course, later on, they expanded into adjacent markets as a way to get more value from the intellectual
