As the economy took a downward turn, entrepreneurial activity started trending upward in recent years. To turn good ideas into sustainable businesses, however, startup companies and sole inventors must look beyond gathering the foundational ingredients.
In a recent post for the Harvard Business Review, professor Daniel Isenberg equated business creation and success to birthing and raising children. While it is certainly important to ensure a baby leaves the hospital nursery with strong vitals, a much larger proportion of the parents' resources should go into the child's continued development.
Isenberg worried that today's startup culture is fixated on speed to the detriment of longevity. What's more, the "more the merrier" notion held by most incubator programs is implicitly broadcasting a message that the quantity of new ventures trumps the quality of their roadmaps.
Amassing a healthy intellectual property portfolio seems central to such conversations of startup sustainability. Not only can patents attract investors and create licensing revenue streams, they may be crucial to protecting a company's core elements from opportunistic entities. As a result, patent strategy should be a dimension of business strategy from the very start within the entrepreneurial community.