The Hindu Business Line : Philips making things better, patently

Currently training in the Netherlands, Mr Shenoy's team of Patent Search Engineers is vetting great ideas from colleagues across the globe and clearing them for patenting.

Their division, the company's newest and hottest called Intellectual Property & Standards, is the company's second global IP unit and the only one outside the Eindhoven base.

IP or intellectual property is serious business for the parent Royal Philips Electronics, which spends about 8-10 per cent or $3.3 billion of sales each year on R&D.

"Technology is becoming fairly prominent and companies are always looking at alternative sources of revenue, such as technology licences," says Mr Shenoy, General Manager, IP&S, who of late has been flitting between here and Eindhoven.

According to him, few companies have looked at making India a home to their IP activities. One of the first such, IP&S will evaluate invention disclosures (IDs) by all employees of Philips worldwide, ensure their novelty, if possible enlarge the scope of their applications and take them onwards for filing in the US and European patent offices.

Patent filing is a costly job that runs into $3,000-4,000 apiece or several hundreds of dollars for managing large patent portfolios through 18-20 years while guarding them against infringements and making sure that royalties keep flowing.

The patent search engineers' job will also be to ensure early on at the ID stage against rejections at the patent offices and get a high patent strike rate. In effect, their onus is to see that in-house ideas can quickly become lucrative products or technologies, Mr Shenoy, who has started seven divisions and is also GM, Philips Centre for Industrial Technology, told Business Line.

After all, he says, for R&D-driven companies like theirs, 70 per cent of their m-cap easily comes from intangible, intellectual assets. The Bangalore patent search engineers may not have the entire range of IP-related roles of the Eindhoven big brother, but their areas have been marked out. They will look into in-house ideas in lighting, medical appliances, software, semiconductors and high-end electronics. The Bangalore IP&S is not exactly meant to be a scene for dashing young blood. The average experience of the four men and two women is 14.5 years; they are mostly academicians, MTechs or PhDs. Only those who would be there for the long haul of at least 10 years were chosen. "These are the kind of people who are in touch with `bleeding edge' technologies that would hit the market in 3-5 years' time."

The training at the company's legal unit at The Hague ends in a month. Each patent search engineer may be identifying 150 patents a year.

With a 4,000-strong research team, Philips today owns 75,000 patents, 22,000 trademarks and 6,000 designs; its logo alone is valued at $5 billion. Each year, it files some 3,500 patents in the US and European patent offices. The revenue from licensing its technologies is also big.

With technologies becoming obsolete almost every six months, Philips also encourages its staff to come out with innovative ideas that could become patents.

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