intellectual-property
(44)
Accelerate Okanagan and the art of making a small city invest
In Kelowna, a technology nonprofit teaches both sides of the funding table. Its lesson for other regions: a promising founder is only half the equation.
The invention came first. CAI built the company.
The Center for Advancing Innovation turns publicly funded research into startup challenges. Its wager: a promising patent needs a capable team as much as a clever scientist.
Ikove Capital builds the company a patent can’t
A university invention can be brilliant and commercially homeless. Ikove Capital’s Startup Nursery supplies the people, capital, and market work that turn research into a business.
New Ventures BC asks the C$200 question: who will buy it?
A startup competition with homework, a volunteer network with rules, and a prize that comes after months of scrutiny. New Ventures BC helps founders turn a clever idea into a business someone might actually buy from.
Innovate Calgary makes the expensive middle of invention cheaper
A rejected accelerator application, shared laboratories and philanthropy-backed investment reveal how Calgary helps research become a business. The useful lesson is where to spend before anyone knows whether an idea will sell.
MAIN. wants Québec’s startup support to stop being a scavenger hunt
Québec has plenty of people helping entrepreneurs. MAIN. works on the connections between them - and is learning that a useful network needs more than a membership list.
Truth Arts wants you to love an ugly goblin
A free NFT mint gave Goblintown its audience. Truth Arts is testing whether that audience will follow its monsters into games, merchandise, and a much longer story.
Greenberg Traurig grew big by keeping decisions small
From a Miami deli to 51 locations, Greenberg Traurig built a global law firm around local authority. Its growth offers a useful lesson in delegation - and a costly reminder that trust needs checking.
Burns & Levinson: The lawyers were valuable. The firm came apart.
A Boston partnership built a business around staying close to clients. Its 2024 breakup reveals what happens when the people carrying those relationships find a better offer.
Clairvolex and the art of making patents less laborious
A patent portfolio is only as useful as the work behind it. Clairvolex turns years of handling that work into software for the inbox, the examiner’s objection, and the decision to keep paying for a patent.
MaxVal Group and the paperwork behind a bright idea
An invention gets the applause. The deadlines get MaxVal. Inside the software-and-services business making intellectual property easier to keep track of, act on and put to work.
Red Points and the cost of being copied
FILA ran out of patience with fighting fakes by hand. Red Points built a business around the awkward truth that a counterfeit listing can multiply faster than a lawyer can remove it.
PIP Labs Bet on Every Idea. The Data Won.
The Palo Alto engineers behind Story built a blockchain for anyone's intellectual property. The lesson from rights holders, AI labs, and a data startup they incubated sent them toward a narrower, more practical trade: proof that training data can be used.
The Patent Lawyer’s New First Draft
DeepIP put generative AI inside Microsoft Word, where patent attorneys already spend their days. The small interface decision reveals a much larger bet: the winner in legal AI may be the system that asks professionals to change the least.
Ticino Built a Front Door for Innovation - and Put a Technopark Behind It
The Canton of Ticino did not build another startup club. It built a triage desk, an accelerator, an investor bridge and a 90%-occupied technopark - then asked a small foundation to make the pieces behave like one system.
Purdue has the patents. Now comes the hard part.
Purdue Innovates connects university inventions with licenses, founders and capital. Its most revealing work happens when a promising idea meets an inconvenient customer.
Triathlon puts university research to work
At Saarland University, a startup can begin with a laser experiment or a round of speed dating. Triathlon connects the people, patents and practical help needed to turn either into a business.
AIC-Nalanda gives Odisha’s startup ideas a place to get real
Inside a Bhubaneswar incubator where prototype benches, patent advice and investor introductions share an address - and the next intake of innovators could still be in school.
Procopio Gives Startups a Desk Down the Hall From Their Lawyers
The San Diego law firm has spent decades advising businesses. Its in-house incubator puts it beside founders before the first big financing - while a wider practice handles everything from waterfront deals to a robotic dog petter.
RWS Has Spent 68 Years Teaching Machines That Words Are the Easy Part
The patent translator from Maidenhead now wants to become the cultural control layer for enterprise AI. A £690 million business, one trillion machine-translated words and a painful 2025 reset show both the promise and the price of that ambition.
The Ad Agency That Refused to Sell Hours - and Started Building the Products
Anomaly made a strange bet: an agency should solve the business problem even when the answer is not an ad. Two decades, seven offices and a few instructive flops later, that bet looks less eccentric than the industry it challenged.
The $20,000 Patent Question: Why IP.com Sometimes Tells Innovators to Publish Instead
For 26 years, IP.com has sold a peculiar form of protection: making selected inventions public. Now its AI software helps legal and R&D teams decide what deserves a patent - and what should become prior art before a rival gets there.
Sotos LLP Built a 46-Year Business on the Fine Print Behind Every Franchise
The Toronto boutique found a narrow door into a very large room: help branded businesses launch, grow, fight and eventually exit. Its advantage is not mystery - it is decades spent learning where a business system tends to crack.
Cassels Stayed in One City for 124 Years. Then Its Clients Wrote the Expansion Plan.
For more than a century, Cassels barely moved from Toronto’s financial core. Its route to becoming a three-office national business firm offers a practical lesson: let client demand choose the map, then redesign the institution around the work.
The Internet Stole the Photograph. ImageRights Built a Tollbooth.
For photographers, finding a stolen image is only the opening scene. ImageRights turned the tedious middle - registration, triage, negotiation and legal routing - into a repeatable business process.
WHP Global’s Product Is the Name on the Box
In seven years, the New York firm assembled 15-plus familiar names and more than $8.5 billion in annual retail sales. Its real product is not a dress, sneaker or toy - it is a system for making old brands travel farther.
The Company That Gets Paid When Everyone Else Gives Up
Founded on the wreckage of a family business, Hilco Global built a $1 billion enterprise by answering one unglamorous question better than anyone: what is this stuff really worth?
The Firm That Buys Fortune 100 Leftovers and Turns Them Into Companies
Big companies spend billions on R&D and then quietly bury most of it. Catalyze Partners digs it back up, staffs it, funds it, and sells it - and lets investors own the whole shelf.
Outlander Capital Wants to Sell You the Blockchain Without You Ever Seeing It
The Dallas firm behind the "Invisible Wallet" is quietly converting patents, pop songs, and NFC tags into assets you can trade - and betting most people will never notice the blockchain underneath.
The 140-Lawyer Firm Built to Make Bigger Rivals Blink
Keker, Van Nest & Peters has one office, no practice departments and a habit of preparing every hard case as if a jury will decide it. In an era of sprawling law-firm empires, constraint is its competitive strategy.