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Company Profile: Innovation Asset Group

Connor Hannan

By Connor Hannan, business development, Lunar Logic

Founded in 2002, Innovation Asset Group – located in Wilsonville, Oregon – has gained a national reputation for its intellectual property management and valuation software. Few companies have effective systems in place to manage and leverage their patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets and related contracts and commitments. Innovation Asset was formed to address this problem. The company’s flagship product, Decipher™, is a web-based application suite that gives CFOs, IP and R&D managers strategic visualization of their entire intellectual property portfolios as well as a lot of tactical functionality.

The company was founded by Peter Ackerman, IAG’s president and CEO. Prior to founding Innovation Asset, Peter was a practicing lawyer who had started his legal career in 1989 at Intel Corp. in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Connor Hannan: How and when did Innovation Asset Group come to be?

Peter Ackerman: Aside from the thrill of a computer with an 8086 processor, 300 baud modem and two 5.25" floppy disks, I was awakened in the early 1980s to the rapidly emerging potential of the information economy. I wanted somehow to combine that with my interest in law. I intentionally chose Santa Clara as a law school because of its intellectual property orientation and location in the heart of Silicon Valley. I spent one of my law school semesters at Oxford University, studying under an expert in IP law who also happened to be one of the original architects of the Lexis search engine. My interest intensified as a result.

I moved to Oregon with my wife in 1989 after law school. I got a job at Intel which had only a few lawyers deployed full-time in Oregon back then. This afforded me an opportunity to get involved with a lot of issues that related to trademarks, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing and sales, antitrust, product liability, warranties, joint ventures and human resources.

But as a newly minted lawyer, I also had a burning desire to see the inside of a courtroom. A federal judge for whom I worked in San Jose during another law school semester had mentioned that the best way to gain experience as a trial lawyer is to be a criminal prosecutor or defense attorney. So with about 200 cc’s of Intel in my veins (enough to last a long time), I took an early career off-ramp and went to work as a prosecutor in Portland. It was an interesting experience and I have a lot of stories about that; suffice it to say that after a couple of years I solved that part of the equation and went into private law practice.

With my experience at Intel and my litigation experience, the circle came back around as I began to deliver intellectual property audit services. I discovered two things: one was that the audit report I delivered was a snapshot in time and companies needed something more enduring. It was helpful for them to see a comprehensive inventory of their existing and potential IP assets, gaps of one sort or another and remedial measures they could take. But what about next week or six months from now? The other discovery was that organizational intellectual property creation is the work of a diffuse cloud of various people, activities, organizations and assets that are difficult to see as a whole. However, there are common issues of identification, timing, ownership, maintenance and commercialization such that a systematized approach is possible. With these two observations, Innovation Asset Group was born.

Quirky as you might think some books like Joseph Jaworski’s Synchronicity are, I think I somehow manifested or willed the core team. Our founding CTO and business development VP understood instantly both the challenge of building this platform and the opportunity it represented. They brought extraordinary talent, commitment and integrity to the table, and we wouldn’t be where we are without them. We’ve built upon this foundation and continued to mature the company with people of excellence.

CH: Could you tell us about how you "partner" with other companies.

PA: Well, we do that in four ways. But it helps first to understand that we are still an early-stage company, having launched our product at the beginning of 2005. We’re headed for a market leadership position but we’re not there yet. So I neither want to go too deeply into our strategic thinking nor to give the false impression that we have a fully constructed partner program. That said, our ultimate “partners” are our shareholders, so I do look for intelligent ways in which to fuel our liquidity value. We are doing this with four kinds of partners: those who provide certain types of data that is of use in our IP valuation system, those who provide strategic IP consulting services, those who provide certain marketing channels, and a variety of resellers.

CH: Your presence and history are strong in Oregon. How has being an Oregon company influenced or affected your expansion into other markets?

PA: We are an Oregon-based company and we’d like to stay that way. This does not affect either our intention or ability to reach the global marketplace for which our application is suited. Further, we have customers in every region of the United States and in other parts of the world. Our market is simply continuing to expand and we are expanding along with it. Thus, I am not aware of any external perception of us as an Oregon company that has had any negative impact.

We are into a different conversation if this question relates to funding, and every entrepreneur in the state understands what I’m referring to. One naturally turns to local sources of funding in the very early stages. We’ve had reasonably good success with a mostly local A-round, but I’d say the effort and pace of that had an affect on the pace of our expansion vision. Things are now beginning to catch up in a good way.

Oregon and SW Washington have enormous potential, but the dynamics of regionally creating and aligning early-stage capital and a fully supported entrepreneurial culture are complex. I hope eventually to make a positive contribution to that process. At the moment, I’m focused on conquering a world.

CH: Where do you see IAG in the market?

PA: We aim for IP-intensive industries and innovation regions. At the global enterprise level we compete with very few systems. There are some providers of point tools and narrow applications as well. They offer portions of what we have and we enjoy having them out there. I say that because this is a nascent market, so the more it can become educated through the collective efforts of vendors in the industry, the better for us all. We are one of the few – if not the only one – that started as a software company with a focus on the business, as opposed solely to the legal aspects of IP management and exploitation. The difference is noticeable to those who sample our product, and I’m told we’re unusually qualitative in terms of the services we deliver. Since the real value of most companies today is in their IP, and there is an emerging economy around this class of assets, our market has huge growth potential. I think we are well-positioned in this market.

CH: What are IAG’s goals for the future?

PA: We are working on making Decipher a standard in the field of IP management and valuation, and on making our company a community of choice for useful information. We’ll do that by constantly enriching the value of our system to the market and demonstrating our unique ability to deliver that value. We believe strongly that we’re on our way toward a market leadership role, which is our ultimate goal.

About the author
Connor Hannan does business development for Lunar Logic, a custom web applications software company. She has a background in sales, marketing and education. She can be reached at connor.hannan@lunarlogic.com.

 

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