[Patent Talk] The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Corporate Patent Management Strategy

This is a column by our patent attorney Taeyoung Lee, published in Etoday on October 27, 2020. It discusses patent management strategy in the data-driven era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

[Patent Talk] The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Corporate Patent Management Strategy

The Fourth Industrial Revolution refers to the shift toward a society characterized by hyper-connectivity and hyper-intelligence based on information and communications technology (ICT). Accordingly, in addition to traditional tech companies, platform companies that focus on collecting and using data have recently been rising rapidly. Google and Amazon among global companies, and Naver and Kakao among Korean companies, are representative examples of platform companies.

The key words of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are technology and data. A company whose business centers on technology is closer to a tech company, while one that centers on data is closer to a platform company. What deserves the most attention, however, is that intangible value is accounting for an ever larger share of corporate value compared with tangible value. A look at the market capitalization rankings of US companies confirms that the top spots are held not by companies based in manufacturing or equipment industries, but by data-centric companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

So what management strategy should companies adopt to survive in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution? The answer is a patent management strategy. Patents and other intellectual property rights are assets that increase a company's intangible value, and published patent information is itself important data for running a business. Such a patent management strategy is essential not only for traditional tech companies but also for platform companies.

Of course, in the case of a platform business, where a company secures a large number of users in a short time and gains a dominant position in its field...

(For the full column, please click the link below.)

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