The Dow Chemical Project in Knowledge Exploitation

In the early 1990s Dow Chemical considered that it was not exploiting to the full extent its intellectual capital, generated over many years requiring a high-level of expenditure [C-36]. So it set up a small team to examine how it might re-engineer its 

Rather than announce some grand plan to manage intellectual capital, the group decided to be make changes of more evolutionary nature and not try to be too revolutionary. So they started with patents, an asset with which many people in the company were familiar. 

While the group knew that Dow possessed an array of other intellectual assets (such as know-how, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets), it reasoned that patents was an area in which it had a high probability of success, could demonstrate obvious value, and implementation of its new processes could be done quickly. 

The group chose to start with the portfolio phase, reasoning that the company already had patents that were under-utilised. Each patent needed to be identified to determine whether it was still active, and find a business that would take over financial responsibility for its maintenance or development. 

Subsequently, each business was asked to classify each of its patents in one of three categories using , will use or will notuse the patent The businesses added other designations such as whether the patents were to be licensed or abandoned. 

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