The IP Business Congress is now fast approaching. On Monday I am flying out to Amsterdam to work on the final preparations. Having never been involved in organising a conference before, I did not realise how much work it involves. I do now!

Anyway, we are going to be more or less at capacity with around 450 delegates at the Grand Hotel Krasnopolsky and we know that many more people would like to have been with us. The problem that CIPOs and other senior IP executives have is that they are – surprise, surprise - very busy people. They often need a full 12 months' notice in order to clear space in their diaries. One of those who wanted to come to the Netherlands but could not is Erin-Michael Gill, head of intellectual property for OQO Inc, the maker of the world’s smallest personal computers. Before taking on this role he developed and managed IP for a $1.4 billion division of DuPont. What’s more Erin-Michael also writes the e^(ip) blog. He has given me permission to rerun a comment piece he posted on his blog on the CIPO Summit portion of the IP Business Congress. I do so in full because, I think, Erin-Michael raises some very important points:

Coming up in Amsterdam is the first ever Chief IP Officer Summit being presented by Intellectual Asset Magazine and Ocean Tomo.

I will not be going this year, but wanted to prepare something important for those who will be attending.

The CIPO in every company must be the CEO and no one else. Whomsoever is designated functional head of IP (whether a licensing, legal, technical or financial professional), it must be their job to:

1. Iteratively and clearly understand the strategy and needs of the business.

2. Determine organisationally what IP issues will need to be addressed by whom and how important will those issues be relative to the other issues on that professionals plate (this prioritisation step is left out of nearly every corporate IP strategy I have ever seen).

3. Look for opportunities where the IP function can make other functional tasks easier in the core business (this includes providing IP based market analysis, competitive insights, technology positioning, financial valuations, inventor recruiting, etc)

4. Design an IP organisation that can rapidly address the highest priority needs to enable the business. Not just the traditional IP needs.

5. Deploy and execute.

6. Measure your results, in dollars, yen or euros, and report back to the executive staff.

Despite one's career ambitions and the need for a functional head to manage the complex and critical needs of an IP department, disassociating IP from the core business is a bad and dangerous idea. We have the opportunity to eliminate many of the negative connotations and stigmas associated with other (often) disassociated functional heads (eg, CIO, GC, etc) and it is important we remain focused on doing so.

When IP is a stand-alone organisation, the office and function is often seen similar to that of a CIO and IT department; fundamentally serving as a necessary enabler, but not critical or core to business development. In this situation, typically a substantial licensing programme is necessary for the organisation to remain relevant.

If one looks at a CIPO as head of a function in a legal organisation, too often they are unfortunately labelled as business roadblocks; ones which need to be checked with, hassled by and finally overcome before products can be offered. It takes a special person to avoid and mitigate that perception, and to interact seamlessly with technology and business leaders.

If we remain focused on enabling business development faster, as above, our function will naturally align with executive decision makers.

So while the title chief intellectual property officer (or something similar: IP managing director, VP of intangibles, exalted head of the unseen) is important to differentiate IP from other functions, it is absolutely critical that we do not unintentionally disassociate our function from the core business. As an industry, instead of creating another peripheral function, our goal should be to make CEOs CIPOs themselves.

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