Intellectual Property
Attic Need Cleaning? Call BCG
It's true. Boston Consulting Group wants to help clients clean their attics — or rather, help them to identify what assets may lie dormant within. In fact, to help jump-start their cleanup effort, BCG recently hired an authority on intellectual property, Kevin Rivette, who co-authored with David Kline Rembrandts in the Attic, a book considered by some to be the bible of intellectual property strategies.
Rivette's initial goal is to help firms begin to recognize that intellectual property asset management is a business issue vital to a company's overall strategy, and no longer something to be disregarded as merely a legal function.
According to Rivette, in a networked world many times the idea becomes the product — and that product is an asset that can generate a company hundreds of millions of dollars per year. What companies are beginning to understand, he points out, is the value of protecting these assets and how they can go about doing this before their competition steals them.
"If you look at an industry like health care, it lives and dies over protected assets," says Rivette, who will be based in the firm's San Francisco office. "If you don't have a protected asset, you can't make money from it.
"So the question now facing companies is, 'How do we protect our competitive advantage?' And the answer is to innovate, protect, and leverage. What we're seeing today is a great deal of media attention focused on patents, and I think that the reason for this is that they are going to become the currency of the networked world."
Niche Solutions
In a New York State of Mind
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, PlanGraphics, an $8 million consulting firm specializing in geographic information systems, was able to play a critical role in relaying information to residents and emergency workers.
The consultancy created maps of Ground Zero containing information regarding the destroyed or weakened buildings in Lower Manhattan, and helped flag "hot spots" so that emergency workers could carry out their efforts out of harm's way.
The maps were created using an application PlanGraphics had introduced only one month before the attacks. Known as the Emergency Management On-line Locator System, the customized application was originally designed to provide NYC citizens with emergency contacts and evacuation routes. Following September 11th, the entire application was enhanced to supply all city agencies and citizens with information regarding subway service, access by car or foot, power outages, etc.
"We're the lead GIS consultant for New York City," says Mike Wiley, project manager for PlanGraphics, which was founded in 1979 and now has six U.S. offices. "When 9/11 happened, we were here and on call. And since there were a lot of restricted zones around Ground Zero that were changed daily and people needing to know where they had access to, the city's Office of Emergency Management asked us to utilize EMOLS in a different way."
The EMOLS project is now serving the function it was originally intended to, while PlanGraphics and the city are continuing to develop new applications.
Consultancy Query
A Sapient Director Inspects the Pipeline
As the managing director of Sapient Corp.'s financial services practice, executive vice president Steve Hoffman today oversees roughly 40 percent of the firm's business. As a former Bain partner and CSC Index consultant, Hoffman today offers a consulting marketplace perspective few consultants can offer.
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