On 21 September, the IfM-led project group Automated Licensing Payment Systems (project) hosted a workshop with thought-leading Intellectual Property (IP) experts and scholars to discuss use cases and challenges of the Bill-of-IP (BoIP) - a novel concept for digital IP management (DIPM).
At its core, the BoIP is a digital repository that organises and links data from product components, IP assets and IP licensing agreements. Linking these components enables a wide range of use cases for an integrated IP management, such as solving challenges inherent in today’s IP licensing payment processes and synchronising information flow across departments. The BoIP is inspired by traditional concepts from Operations and IP management (e.g. Bill of Materials and Patent-to-Product maps) and extends them to take IP management into the digital era.
The BoIP is being designed and built as part of the Research England funded Pitch-In project “Automated Licensing Payment Systems” (ALPS). ALPS is a blockchain-based platform technology that leverages smart contracts to re-establish trust and reduce existing challenges in IP licensing management by automating IP licensing payment processes. Within ALPS, the BoIP acts as a trusted intermediary to store and verify licensing agreements before being deployed as self-executing smart licenses.
The workshop served to identify key challenges that the BoIP concept might face in practice and explored potential use cases beyond ALPS. The workshop was divided into two parts, each of which contained an input session and a discussion. The event was chaired by Dr Frank Tietze, Lecturer at the IfM and head of the IIPM lab. Frank was joined by Julius Theye (visiting graduate student from TU Munich), Damiano di Francesco Maesa (Postdoctoral research associate developing the ALPS technology) and Nicola Thorn (CEO of AND Technology Research, ALPS’ use case partner) who provided input on the Bill-of-IP, the ALPS system and the use case of AND’s IoT development platform, an ALPS project partner.
The first half of the workshop dealt with the structure and composition of the BoIP. After an introductory presentation on the BoIP, the workshop participants were allocated to one of three break out rooms to discuss the BoIP concept and its practical challenges. The discussions proved lively and constructive, revolving mainly around the difficulty of correctly and comprehensively mapping the BoIP’s components to each other. Multiple participants highlighted the ambiguities and the complexity inherent in licensing agreements e.g. containing both product and method claims. It was also noted that one participant had worked at a company whose ERP system had been customised to enable the functionality that the BoIP provides.
The second half of the workshop covered the potential use case of the BoIP for solving both internal and external IP management challenges. Setting the context, both the ALPS technology and the use case, AND’s IoT development platform, were introduced. The discussions covered several interesting topics ranging from IP mapping, over software activation tracking to data in-licensing. Multiple participants highlighted the potential of the BoIP to digitise internal IP management by synching knowledge about changes in licensing conditions across departments or to track incoming payments from out-licensed IP. In the final wrap up, a more innovative use case for the BoIP was discussed, namely the arising challenge of tracking the value attribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to its training datasets.
The ALPS team (Frank Tietze, Damiano di Francesco Maesa, Julius Theye) will follow up with individual feedback sessions to tackle the conceptual challenges of the BoIP and with ideation workshops to further explore potential use cases.