IAM 86 now published - we name the individuals driving the global IP market in 2017

Issue 86 of IAM has now been published and is available to subscribers online. Inside this issue, we name our IAM Market Makers of 2017. This is our annual assessment of who we believe the main drivers of the global IP market are: the individuals involved in the most patent transactions or the most interesting ones, those who are changing perceptions of IP value creation – or those who are doing a mixture of all of the above. In short, the people who we think make things tick.

When putting together the list, we consider a lot of names and apply just a single rule: only one person per organisation can be featured; no entity gets two representatives on the list. And in most cases, representatives is what the market makers are: they are not doing it on their own, instead they lead high-quality teams who are doing world-class work.

This year, things were made even more complicated by three high-profile corporate moves in late summer: Allen Lo’s switch from Google to Facebook, Brian Hinman’s decision to leave Philips and Mark Kokes’s sudden departure from BlackBerry. But we got there in the end. No doubt we will receive the usual glut of emails from various parts of the world with feedback about what we got right – and, much more likely, how much we got wrong. We would not have it any other way!

Of course, there is a lot more to IAM 86 than the market makers. The auto sector has become a lot more IP-focused and we take a deep dive into some of the big patent issues that now confront the industry. With IPBC Asia taking place in Tokyo at the end of October, we also turn the focus onto Japan with an article from a former IP head at Honda looking at the ways in which in-house groups in the country are reinventing themselves and another piece that explores how the country’s biggest bank is using IP big data to bolster its equity analysis.

In the United States, meanwhile, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board is celebrating its fifth birthday: we publish two very different perspectives on how it has fared. Look out, too, for a special focus on patent issues in the financial technology sector, based on a very select gathering of senior leaders from the industry we hosted in New York in May. Throw in a management report on patenting in Asia, plus all the usual columns and our data pages, and this IAM will keep subscribers busy as the days grow shorter (or longer, if you are down under). We will be back with our final 2017 offering at the end of November.