IP Experts – Ones to Watch in 2014

I was interviewed last month by Acquisition International, as part of their “Ones to Watch in 2014: IP Experts” panel.  I talked about the impact of IP in acquisitions, using the Smart Grid as an example.

If you are interested you can view the October edition online, or let me know and I can email the pdf copy of the full writeup.

Some excerpts of the interview are below:

IP is becoming a key piece of both growth and acquisition plans.

In the energy sector, specifically the Smart Grid and Smart Home sectors, there is a growing market opportunity that many firms are moving to capitalise on. Within these sectors, IP is becoming a key piece of both growth and acquisition plans. Considering in more detail the smart home sector, as firms like Google and Samsung pursue growth into the sector through acquisition, other new entrants are trying to position themselves to be an alternate platform for the market – which is projected to be at US$100bn by 2018. The position of this market is a list of highly fragmented sub-segments, coupled with no one venture owning a controlling piece of the entire segment, which means key players are looking for acquisition targets to become the market leader.

With IP being critical for this growing market, from the acquisition perspective this results in the need for deep analysis of any venture portfolio to ensure it will result in future value. Analysis of the entire sector trends also indicate which firms are prime targets fo acquisition, and hold key IP assets for this growing future market. For investors the areas of lighting control, intelligent bulbs and consumer smart devices hold the largest market share opportunities. There are other smaller sub-segments that still have no large market leader yet hold tremendous opportunity for investors that have the capital to build market leadership through acquisition.