IP Culture - a Political Priority?

by Peter Ackerman
CEO and President
Innovation Asset Group, Inc.

I am frequently asked to post to our blog. I’ve liked the excuse that my reflective nature requires more time. My blog blockage is cured with this. Nothing to do with political predilections. President Bush was asked about whether over-the-air broadcasters should pay performance royalties. Turned out to be esoteric from his perspective (“I have like no earthly idea what you’re talking about”). The question was asked by Al McCree, president of Altissimo! Recordings. Just an interesting subsurface alignment between the two that McCree is in the business of recording, licensing and distributing military music. His company licenses music from all of the U.S. Armed Services and their label is found in military academies, on military bases and in war memorials across the United States. It appears that, following a tour in Vietnam in which he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, he was a constituent of Governor Bush in Texas for a time. Not that one would have expected the president to know that.

But that’s not my point. The point I want to make is that I might have preferred a response that even generically referred to the critical need to maintain a national entrepreneurial culture. I would have preferred that a question containing the key words “royalties” and “music exports” triggered the mind into gear about the competitiveness of U.S. innovation and protected creative expression. It’s what savvy political leaders do. This has nothing to do with McCree’s specific issue. And it has nothing to do with political ideology. I asked a Democratic candidate for an Oregon U.S. Senate seat about his thoughts regarding capital availability for emerging U.S. technology companies. His answer was that he felt it was a “state” issue, one for the governor to be concerned about. Great. Oregon to an extent seems to get that as I’m sure other states do. But really it’s a national issue.

It’s simply a matter of priorities and re-jiggering the A-list of mentally-parked talking points. Strikes me that so much falls out of the subject of intellectual asset formation. This is still probably the best country for giving birth to an idea and navigating it to a point of commercialization. And ultimately, an environment that nurtures good ideas is an environment capable of liberating itself from myriad ills and dependencies. But there is much more to be done, as highlighted in a piece last year in U.S. News & World Report.

Sure, I self-servingly want intellectual property issues to be on the front of everyone’s mind. But more broadly, I just want the economic reality and possibilities of a fully supported knowledge economy to be tightly packed in the minds of our political leaders. We’re getting there. eBay and Alan Greenspan among others woke a few people up. But what you read and hear about the most - piracy and patent reform - are symptoms. There’s a lot to think about on the front end of the entrepreneurial value chain. Another post for another day.

It was just a question of the president by someone whose interests would be served by a good answer. Sometimes larger thoughts can be triggered by small things.