Intellectual Property-Games and Strategies

Programme Overview
We live in the knowledge economy – an era where knowledge is the primary input, knowledge is the process, and knowledge itself is the output. Increasingly, what we consume are not products, but intellectual property embedded within them.

Consider your favourite companies. Strip away their physical assets and ask: what truly creates value? Almost without exception, the answer lies in intangibles – algorithms, designs, software, data, patents, brands, trade secrets, and proprietary know-how. These invisible assets shape customer experience, confer competitive advantage, and today account for as much as 85 – 90% of a firm’s market valuation.

Suzanne and Sullivan (2012), in Edison in the Boardroom — Revisited, capture this historic shift by documenting how corporate value has steadily migrated from tangible assets – land, plant, and machinery – to intellectual assets such as formulas, specifications, technical know-how, patents, copyrights, designs, software, and brand equity.

Yet, despite their dominance, intellectual property assets are often poorly understood, weakly governed, and strategically under-leveraged. Firms routinely own IP without fully understanding how to defend, deploy, monetize, or strategically interact around it.

This executive program approaches intellectual property not merely as a legal construct, but as a strategic asset shaped by incentives, competition, and games. Through a game-theoretic lens, participants will explore how firms create, protect, signal, share, and contest IP — and how smart strategies around IP can determine who wins, who imitates, and who gets locked out of the game.

Programme Content
The program equips participants with the legal, economic, and strategic foundations required to leverage intellectual property in complex business environments.

It begins with the theoretical foundations of intellectual property, including utilitarian theory, the structure of IP rights systems, the concept of innovation, and principles of exclusion and value capture — clarifying how and why IP creates economic value.

The program then examines patents as strategic assets, covering the patenting process, legal definitions, infringement and remedies, and the practical skill of reading and interpreting patent claims. Key infringement cases illustrate how courts assess non-obviousness and inventive step, and why these interpretations matter for business decisions.

Participants learn to use patent information as a strategic tool, focusing on identifying, extracting, and interpreting patent data for technology and competitive intelligence. This includes patent data analytics, different types of patent maps, how to construct them, and how to derive actionable insights for innovation and business management.

The program also addresses design protection, including product design, non-functional aesthetic protection, registration processes, infringement standards, and leading cases.

A core differentiator is the integration of business negotiations and game theory, enabling participants to analyze strategic interactions around IP – licensing, bargaining, signaling, and deterrence – using real data and decision frameworks.

Through freedom-to-operate analysis, participants learn how firms assess and mitigate patent risks, supported by case studies of how leading companies combine legal, technological, and business strategies to avoid competitive blind spots.

The program further covers patent and design licensing, focusing on key contractual elements such as negotiation structure, warranties, indemnities, liabilities, and dispute resolution.

Beyond patents, it introduces trade secrets, trademarks, and geographical indications, including the role of trade dress, as well as plant variety protection and semiconductor design and layout protection, with particular relevance to India’s agricultural and technology sectors.

The program concludes with technology business incubation in India, examining incubation models, technology assimilation, and B2B collaboration between startups and large firms.

Key Benefits/Takeaways
This program enables participants to move from IP awareness to IP advantage. It equips leaders with the ability to interpret, evaluate, and deploy intellectual property as a strategic asset that directly influences innovation outcomes, competitive positioning, and firm valuation.

What Participants Will Gain

• A clear understanding of the strategic role of patents, designs, trademarks, and trade secrets in modern corporations
• The ability to identify, protect, and leverage internal intellectual property, and to assess when external IP should be acquired through licensing or partnerships
• Practical skills to read and interpret patent and design information, enabling informed decisions rather than blind reliance on legal advisors
• Hands-on exposure to patent data analytics and mapping, supporting evidence-based discussions at the board and senior management level
• An integrated understanding of the legal, technological, and business dimensions of patents and designs, and how these interact in real-world decision-making