As integral part of the Centre for Technology Management, at the Department of Engineering, Institute for Manufacturing, the IIPM lab takes an engineering management (firm level) and relational perspective on IP within distributed and collaborative (open) innovation processes for emerging (manufacturing) technologies. The IIPM lab is headed by Dr Frank Tietze.

Our research on Innovation and IP Management (IIPM) focuses on two priority areas:

1. Strategic IP management for effective innovation processes

We focus on IP issues that are of strategic relevance for technology-based firms, e.g. within R&D activities, innovation processes but also in corporate strategy and decision making. Our research focuses on IP management in the context of emerging technologies. For instance, we look into open IP strategies, such as patent pledges, for establishing standards as well as IP based business models.

2. New technologies for reinventing IP management

Technologies underpinning IP management have changed drastically over the recent decades with patent data being digitized and the continous development of increasingly sophisticated software solutions for analyzing and visualizing IP data. We however believe that this has just been the beginning and we are a tipping point for how IP management is being handled. Technologies such as AI, deep and machine learning have been adopted in other domains already to a much more sophisticated level that for IP analytics. Technologies, such as blockchain (and distributed ledger technologies) may contribute to digitization of licensing transactions and the automation of complex royalty payment streams. We are interested to better understand the business cases for those and other technologies and contribute to the development of such solutions that help to „reinvent“ IP management.