Overcoming Innovation Barriers: 5 Approaches to Better Connect IP and R&D
Innovation
March 10, 2025
In many organizations, IP departments and R&D teams operate on their own islands, and there is a lack of alignment between these two groups and the business. In this blog, Vincent Brault, SVP of Product & Innovation at Anaqua, and Daniel Doherty, Senior Solutions Consultant at Anaqua, share five best practices for improving collaboration between IP departments and R&D teams, and how technology can help create greater alignment with business goals.
1. Align IP and R&D Innovation Efforts to Deliver Bottom-Line Growth
Often, IP and R&D are not well aligned, potentially leading to R&D dollars being wasted on products that cannot be patented or patents of limited value.
While a company’s strategy may be straightforward at the macro level, executing the strategy can be difficult, especially when different departments are not aligned. The IP team can play a critical role in translating broad business goals into specific objectives, identifying competitive gaps, and addressing issues. Documenting these objectives for inventors to review and consider is essential. Additionally, measuring the new ideas generated in each area ensures that innovation programs remain focused and effective.
At a micro level, companies often improve alignment by better linking IP assets to the corresponding products, markets, and revenues. This provides rich insights for different teams.
As you identify specific gaps, problems and objectives to be solved, you want the IP team and business leaders involved in the ideation stage to ensure that the innovation will have a business impact and result in IP assets that can be enforced in the future. These proactive measures can significantly enhance the organization’s innovation efforts and contribute to long-term business success and deliver bottom-line growth.
2. Eliminate Obstacles to Innovation
To generate the best new ideas at your organization, it’s vital to make the innovation process highly inclusive and to encourage idea submission with an online portal that is inviting and easy for business users.
- Welcome all ideas from across the organization: Involving all professionals from across the business in the innovation process helps to break down organizational silos, ensuring that people can work together and bring diverse viewpoints to drive innovation.
- Bring all ideas together in collaborative platforms: Many inventor portals have been designed by IP experts from a prosecution perspective with forms that are foreign to business users. Instead, create excitement with an IP management platform that offers branded portal or portals for specific R&D teams to give innovators a unique experience. Promote current company initiatives to keep employees informed and focused, driving the flow of focused new ideas.
Collaboration looks different in every organization. But bringing together all ideas together in collaborative technology platform can help any organization to enable seamless communication and capture the most impactful ideas early on.
3. Create a Safe and Collaborative Culture
Innovating is scary - there can often be a fear of failure and judgement. But new ideas are the lifeblood of companies, so a culture of innovation needs to be fostered. These are some of the ways Anaqua clients have overcome this challenge:
- Recognize successful inventors with awards or remuneration (which, in some jurisdictions, is a legal requirement) because they are the ones who create value
- Make it easy for inventors to collaborate and refine ideas in an online environment
- Develop a culture of innovation and diversity by welcoming all ideas
- Create an ‘idea incubator' where inventors on the same team can build on each other's ideas and refinements
Psychological safety is the bedrock of innovation. Amy Edmonson’s The Fearless Organization highlights how companies with a trusting work environment perform better. Google’s Project Aristotle further supports this, identifying psychological safety as the key factor distinguishing the most successful teams. This research reinforces the need to protect inventors from fear of humiliation. Creativity thrives when fear of failure or judgment does not inhibit individuals.
4. Early Protection of Innovation and Security
In the United States, corporate intangible assets grew to $61 trillion in 2023 up from 8% in 2022. Understandably, uncontrolled access to these assets, including access to confidential information, by internal and external parties can destroy business value.
To prevent this reduction of business value, IP attorneys should be involved at the ideation level of innovation, training inventors on confidentiality and IP, while also controlling access and distribution of information.
Inventor portals with workflows that ensure your ideas get to the right person can help sharing with only those people that are needed to review and evaluate them. By leaning on unified, collaborative IP management platforms, IP and R&D teams can easily capture and track new ideas and ensure that IP protection is integrated early in the product development process.
5. Establish Disciplined Innovation Processes
What often holds corporate innovation programs is established frameworks and disciplined processes. Without clearly defined and measurable innovation and IP objectives, there is no framework for measurement and accountability.
A disciplined approach to innovation management enables the leadership team to understand the R&D innovation pipeline, the quality of the innovation, and the current trends, allowing you to drive innovation or course-correct if required. Look for an IP management platform that is a centralized global platform that can store all this information, including historical data. Platforms such as this will help you to:
- Get the quantity and quality of ideas you need for specific company objectives
- Manage course correction effectively within an innovation framework
- Understand your innovation pipeline to make strategic decisions
Summary: Keeping Your R&D and IP Efforts Connected
The best innovation and IP initiatives require people, technology, and business strategy. Working closely together, IP and R&D play an essential role in translating big-picture business objectives into specific goals and gaps to ensure innovation is focused.
Establishing defined frameworks through technology helps bring rigor and efficiency to the entire innovation pipeline. Incorporating each of these five practices into your organization and increasing collaboration between IP and R&D creates an atmosphere that can drive focused innovation that creates business value.
To learn more on this subject, watch the full webinar to learn how Anaqua clients have improved their IP management and see how AQX® Innovation Management facilitates each of these steps.
Watch the Webinar On-Demand
Additional content you may like:
- Gain Transparency into Your Innovation Pipeline with AQX Innovation Management - Anaqua IP Management Software and Services
- How AQX Innovation Management Improves Collaboration Across the Organization
- Tools for Managing Innovation to Gain Strategic Advantage
- Amy Edmondson: HBS phsychological safety is the bedrock of innovation
- The Missing Link Between Strategy and Innovation (hbr.org)
- Corporate Intangible Assets Grew to USD 61.9 trillion in 2023
