Innovation capture

Now you’ve explored some of the contexts in which IP is produced, let’s consider some practical approaches to developing your ideas further, adding detail around how you intend to create value from them. For example, will you make a product yourself or license the production rights to someone else? Will you sell your new service to customers directly or negotiate the rights with an intermediary to deliver it?

Understanding how you intend to produce and create IP from a strategic perspective is referred to as ‘innovation capture’. This term is usually applied in scientific and technological contexts but is also a useful method for organising your ideas.

Innovation capture is a process through which you record the development of your idea(s), how you intend to use them and what you may do with them in the future. It helps individuals and organisations that work with IP to extract potential commercial opportunities from ideas, prioritise them and decide which to bring to market. As you grow your business, whether you’re an independent individual creator or working in an organisation, this is a very important process in managing your IP.

Ways to capture your innovation include:

• Notebooks
• Audio recordings
• Video recordings
• Digital text files (e.g. Word documents)

The method you use will depend on the type of IP you create as well as how you prefer to engage with the process. The important consideration (especially if you are an individual working with an organisation) is that you can trace ownership of your ideas. Whichever innovation capture method you use, your entries should be dated and, where possible, a person in authority could sign as proof of date and authenticity. For example, you may have a great idea for a new product which you have recorded in your notebook. You could go to your line manager and request they sign the notebook as proof that you created the IP on that day; this can help you to protect your IP and ideas.

To help you get started, here are some constructive ways of getting your ideas flowing and recorded.

• Freewriting: a strategy developed by Peter Elbow in 1973¹. You write down your thoughts in continuous sentences and paragraphs without stopping. At this point don’t worry about spelling or grammar, the aim is to get your thoughts out without judging them in the first instance. Only once they’re all down on paper would you go back over them to edit and arrange them into a coherent order.
• Idea mapping: a visual representation of your thinking process. You can use symbols, images, drawings and words to communicate your thoughts. Maps and diagrams make some of the relationships and connections between ideas evident, and can spur further ideas in one direction without confusing another.

Learning Journal

Try using free writing or idea mapping to add more detail to one of the ideas that you would like to develop through this course.

Reference

TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF FREEWRITING. Peter Elbow in Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1989), pp. 42-71 (30 pages)