Intellectual property
Definition
Explicit knowledge assets that are protected by law including patents, trademarks, copyrights, licenses
Description
Intellectual property (IP) is an intangible asset that has commercial value. In nuclear R&D organizations the development of IP is a key deliverable of the organization and as such should be protected. As well as physical assets such as designs, inventions, software etc. ‘employee know-how’ is also regarded as IP. In fact the value of employee know-how in many R&D organizations far outweighs the value of physical assets. Protecting all kinds of IP involves:
- Taking an inventory of existing IP;
- Assessing IP value;
- Implementing controls on high value items and then integrating these controls into the management system.
Taking an inventory of ‘employee know-how’ is essentially the same task as identifying critical knowledge in the organization, hence there is an obvious linkage here with the KM tools and techniques described in Section 6 of this publication.
- Applicable organizational functions;
- All types of R&D organization, but with particular relevance to:
- Applied research functions;
- Design R&D functions;
- Technical support & services functions.
- All types of R&D organization, but with particular relevance to:
- Related KM tools/techniques to consider:
- Identification of critical knowledge;
- Knowledge loss risk assessment;
- Succession planning;
- Tacit knowledge capture;
- Explicit knowledge search/find;
- IT tools to facilitate the techniques above.
