| This book marks an important stage in my professional life. In one way it may seem a digression
from my profession as an attorney, but on second thought it seems that everything that
I have been doing in the past seven years of my professional life were leading to this book. Being
a business lawyer, I came to appreciate that my corporate (mostly multinational) clients need to
manage intellectual assets in a more systematic way. Many legal audits I performed boiled down
to advising on ways that management can implement to better protect and leverage their intellectual
assets and knowledge resources. With that in mind I embarked on my LLM with one main
end goal—first to learn best practices in this area (by learning from the best—Pierce Law’s international
reputation is what brought me to the small town of Concord, New Hampshire) and then
to develop models that systematically manage intellectual assets.
Soon after, I discovered that intellectual assets (or property) management is only one part of
the equation for managing all of a business’s intellectual resources or capital. My research
expanded beyond an LLM, and that was when the support of the progressive dean and faculty of
Pierce Law proved invaluable. The dean, John Hutson, adopted and financially supported my
research and course development, which expanded beyond IP law and management into the
related disciplines of knowledge and intellectual capital management as well. His futuristic
vision of the role of IP lawyers in the knowledge economy fueled this venture.
This book grows out of my professional experience for the past seven years and my intensive
research for the past three years, and from teaching intellectual capital management courses to
law students, attorneys, IP managers, and business executives who come to Pierce Law. The book
is directed at the manager who needs to develop pragmatic approaches and systems for the management
of intellectual resources and capital. It is also written for the general reader who needs
to appreciate the emerging field of intellectual capital management (ICM) with a methodical
approach. It is hoped that this book will advance both academic and applied research and experimentation
in this field and contribute to its modest literature in this area. |
