Wayne’s post put me mind of the time I did some consultancy work for the food, household, and pharma/med products company Unilever way back in the 1990s. They were (probably still are) very much a knowledge led company. Indeed, Unilever paid for the center for molecular informatics in the department of chemistry at Cambridge University, so it’s definitely into new ideas.

They continuously come up with novel and innovative ideas and one of the issues they faced was how to manage and disseminate that knowledge quickly among their different departments.

At the time, it was repeatedly stressed that once someone has an idea that might be commercialized there is a tiny window of around 6 months within which it has to be developed to the point of getting it to market. If you fail, then someone else will have come up with the same idea in the meantime and will beat you to it. that 6 months timeframe may have tightened even more in the last decade.

Six months, of course, is way to short a time for a patent to be applied for and approved and goes part way to explaining why the patent literature is littered with essentially duplicate inventions from foaming shaving gels to weird and wonderful ice creams and from novelty gadgets to the hundreds of pieces of software that are nothing more than refined copies of each other. This is something that patent expert Greg Aharonian repeatedly derided in his patents alert newsletter from the early 1990s and beyond.