Howard Krass liked the room. Visiting the Phillips Collection in Washington with his wife, Stephanie, he found that its intimate setting offered a different relationship with the paintings. A business biography usually opens with a founding date, a funding round or an award. A museum is a more pleasant entrance, and in Krass’s case it belongs on the map.
The founder and CEO of IPD Analytics has spent much of his working life around intellectual property: acquiring rights, interpreting competitive positions and helping companies think about what gives an idea commercial value. Beyond that work, he has taken on responsibilities in entrepreneurship education, university access and the arts. The connections are concrete enough to spare us a grand theory of his character.
There is, however, a useful thread to follow. His professional work deals with things whose importance can be easy to miss on first inspection. A patent right. A shift in a competitive market. The structure behind a business model. His museum recollection adds a quieter point: sometimes the conditions in which you look change what you see.
The lawyer was already building a business
Krass grew up in the greater Detroit metropolitan area. His education took him to the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a bachelor of arts, and to the university’s School of Law, where he earned his J.D. Two degrees from the same university provide the first clear landmarks in a career that would settle in Miami.
From 1991 to 1996, he practiced at Nortman & Bloom. His work covered corporate law, intellectual property licensing and litigation. That combination put business arrangements, ownership and disputes within the same professional field of view. It is a useful background for someone whose later companies would make intellectual property central to their work.
In 1993, during those years in practice, he founded Intellectual Property Development, Inc., to acquire and commercialize patent rights. The overlap matters. The legal career and the entrepreneurial career were already running together. The company’s name was admirably literal: it identified the asset and proposed to do something with it. There are worse ways to introduce a business.
IPD Analytics dates its inception to 2002; the Florida limited liability company filing followed in January 2003. The distinction keeps two different milestones in their proper places. What emerged was a business selling proprietary research and competitive intelligence through subscriptions and related services. Krass had moved from commercializing rights to building a company around the analysis of markets and competition.
Giving research a second life in software
The business also had to become something people could use repeatedly. Research has a demanding double life: someone must produce it, and someone else must be able to find, understand and apply it. At IPD Analytics, the delivery system became part of the company’s development. Software helped turn specialist work into a recurring subscription service.
An eight-year development partnership with Informulate addressed an aging application, workflows and reporting. The project brought more of the work into a custom application used across the company and its client base. Centralized reporting and simpler processes were practical components of that transition. The details are less photogenic than a launch party, though they tend to remain useful for longer.
This chapter gives Krass’s founder title some operational substance. A firm organized around expert analysis still needs a system through which that expertise travels. Its people need workable processes; its subscribers need an accessible product. The company’s software development history shows attention to those requirements alongside the research itself, with the application becoming part of how the service was delivered.
A check, with questions attached
At IPD Capital, where Krass is managing member, the intellectual property theme takes another form. The firm combines investment with strategic advice at board level. Its approach includes working with company legal teams on patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. The legal vocabulary of Krass’s early practice remains quite at home in the investment business.
The firm’s published investment range is $250,000 to $5 million. Among its areas of interest are technology, manufacturing and software, with an emphasis on businesses that depend on, or can benefit from, a developed intellectual property strategy. Its stated focus includes companies approaching or moving beyond proof of concept, when the shape of a product is becoming clearer.
Capital alongside intellectual property strategy and board-level advice.
The work described extends from examining existing and pending intellectual property to reviewing strategy, legal resources and associated costs. After investment, it includes advice on allocating capital to build and maintain the portfolio of rights. This is an investment proposition with a lawyer’s attention to the supporting documents. The pitch has room for both ambition and the bill for protecting it.
Read beside the 1993 commercialization business, IPD Capital makes a coherent next chapter. The recurring subject is the economic use of intellectual property. The setting changes, from acquiring rights to analyzing competition to investing in companies. Each business puts that subject to a different use, which is more informative than treating every venture as an unrelated new beginning.
An individual award, a collective thank-you
On October 8, 2020, Krass was announced as an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Florida Award winner. An independent judging panel selected him. The recognition considered matters including innovation, financial performance, societal impact and talent management. It arrived after years of company building, rather than at the opening of the story.
The ceremony had its own period detail: EY announced the award at a virtual gala hosted by Deborah Norville. Krass’s response supplied the more personal part. He publicly thanked EY and directed attention toward the colleagues at his two firms. The award carried his name; his acknowledgment widened the circle.
“I share this award with my amazing teammates at IPD Analytics and IPD Capital.”
Howard Krass · October 2020
That is a modest but useful piece of evidence about how he chose to mark the occasion. It puts other people into a milestone normally told through a single executive. A company’s biography contains more names than its award announcements can accommodate. For that moment, Krass made space for the team in his own words.
A different seat at the table
His involvement in entrepreneurship education has a history of its own. Krass served on the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s South Florida advisory board and chaired it in 2012 and 2013. That role connected his established business career with an organization concerned with people learning how to begin theirs.
In 2022, the Southeast Regional Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge program listed him as a fireside chat moderator. The featured founder was Jonathan Ovadia, co-founder and CEO of virtual reality company AEXLAB. Ovadia had completed his own NFTE course in 2011. The program placed an alumnus building a business back within the organization where he had studied entrepreneurship.
The pairing makes a better anecdote than an abstract claim about supporting innovation. One participant had a career rooted in law and intellectual property; the other was developing a virtual reality business. Krass’s part was to moderate the conversation. Experience had a specific job to do on that occasion: help another entrepreneur’s work become the subject of discussion.
In January 2024, he joined the Posse Foundation’s national board of directors. The foundation identifies students for academic and leadership potential and works with partner colleges and universities. Its work includes preparation before college, support on campus and connections to careers. The appointment added a further education commitment to Krass’s public record.
Posse announced him alongside Jason Jacobs, David Korol, Erin McCandless and Arta Tabaee. The foundation’s current national board directory continues to list Krass. Together with his earlier NFTE role, the appointment shows involvement at different points in a young person’s development: learning entrepreneurship and gaining access to university opportunities.
The picture beyond the office
Then there is the museum. Krass served as a trustee of the Phillips Collection from September 2017 to January 2023. His appreciation of the place had a distinctly human scale. Recalling the visit with Stephanie, he described the experience of encountering paintings in that setting:
“You can relate to the masterpieces in a different manner due to the unique and intimate setting.”
Howard Krass · The Phillips Collection, FY2017
The arts connection also reaches South Florida. Stephanie and Howard Krass were among the sponsors of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s exhibition Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983), whose opening took place in November 2023. Their names appear together in the museum’s donor recognition as well. This part of the biography has institutions and projects attached to it.
Those details give the profile its proportions. Krass is a founder, an executive and an investor whose career repeatedly returns to intellectual property. He has also spent time on museum governance and education boards. A legal practice, a subscription business, an investment firm and a painting do not require a single grand explanation to belong in the same life.
The museum recollection is a good place to leave him. For someone whose businesses involve examining rights and competitive positions, his pleasure in a particular setting for looking at art is an engaging detail. It lets the person remain visible beside the professional titles. Even a career built around analysis benefits from a room in which to look around.