An obsession with doing things better

From a rural converted barn just outside Birmingham, UK, IP Centrum is developing IP formalities services which appear to challenge the norms and conventions of an industry built, with good reason, on norms and convention.

With a claimed standard two-week European patent validation turnaround, significantly reduced costs compared to traditional methods, and a remarkable zero-fail record to date, the company seems to grate against that old truth about business: that it’s not possible to be fast, high-quality and low-cost all at the same time.

The easy interface and slick services visible from the outside hide a list of challenged industry norms and conventional wisdom, which seem obvious in retrospect, but are products of a different culture and a different approach, even to the very notion of ‘services’ as a concept.

CEO Simon de Banke’s vision for IP services has always been an unusual one, relying on re-imagining the way in which the industry operates as a whole. What once seemed like simply nice talk from an industry upstart increasingly looks like a credible rethinking of the established norms upon which the industry has long-relied. It certainly seems to be working.

WIPR spoke to him to get more into the details of what is so different about IP Centrum’s approach, and why.

You speak a lot about IP Centrum’s obsession with doing things differently. Is different necessarily better?

Different definitely does not automatically mean better. But I don’t think great change and progress can happen without thinking and acting differently.

When we build services we work extremely hard to avoid knowing “how it’s done”. It’s very hard to meaningfully ask questions when you already have stock answers to them, and so the more you know about how a problem is usually solved, the harder it is to come up with something new.

We question everything, and we will not settle for “because that’s how it’s done” as an answer. This has led us to some incredible breakthroughs, some of which seemed impossible or at least impractical before, but appear obvious and easy now.

Everyone wants to achieve a 100% success rate, in this or any other industry. What is it about IP Centrum which makes you able to accomplish what you think other providers can’t?

I wouldn’t say “can’t”, but I think for now they just “haven’t”. There are a lot of very smart people in the IP industry. We’re no smarter than the smartest people in the industry. I think we just come at it from a different angle.

One of the most important factors is that we build our services like products. This is an important distinction. Services are traditionally built by employing a team of people with experience and knowledge so that when a question is asked, or an instruction received, one of the team knows what to do or who to ask.

A product can’t do that. A television needs to know exactly how to switch channel, or increase the volume, or alter the colour gamut—should it be instructed to do so—before it leaves the factory. It can’t ask someone, or seek clarification from its customer. Both the process of delivery and the user interface need to be defined and perfected before the first instruction is received.

We think of services the same way. We obsess over identifying every possible question, and every possible instruction up front, before we open the service for business. We design processes to make this super-efficient, and we build a method, to allow our clients to place these instructions with us, that is so clear and unambiguous that it just feels like magic.

These kinds of things mean we don’t misunderstand, or have an off-day, or make mistakes, or cause delays. It all just happens without fuss or fanfare, and we love that.

The downside is that the front-loaded effort and cost to produce a service is much greater compared to traditional methods, before we take a single instruction. And we only find out if we’ve done a good job once we go live and people either love it or we have to accept we’ve messed up and need to learn and make changes.

How do you work out what direction to develop your services in? Do you get feedback from clients, or conduct market research?

This can be misunderstood, but we actually work really hard not to involve our clients in the development of our services. This sounds arrogant, yet it is actually the absolute opposite. Henry Ford was famed for saying “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses’.” It feels a little like that was an insult, but I like to think he just meant “It isn’t my customer’s job to obsess day and night about how to build a revolutionary new product so I can sell it back to them. It’s mine!”

Of course there are incredibly valuable and insightful learnings to be had by listening extremely carefully to our clients—and we do. But if we decide to rely on our clients to do our innovating for us, then we’re just being lazy, and laziness never produces spectacular results.

There’s massive jeopardy in that ethos of course. If what we deliver is bad, then our clients tell us straight, or will (quite understandably) just stop using us! But we just think it’s a bit of a cop-out to ask if what we’re doing is good, to somehow try to avoid taking that responsibility.

What is it about the business that allows you to work in this way?

I guess the yin and yang which makes up the ethos and culture of any great business could be characterised as engineering and philosophy. On one hand you have the functional, the activities, methods, rules and constraints: the engineering. On the other side is the way you think about things, and the actual way you perform the engineering part: the philosophy.

At IP Centrum, the philosophy certainly leads and guides the engineering, which is not always the case in business.

For example, we work with a wonderful team of foreign associates and agents around the world who perform spectacular work for us, and we think of them as family.

We select them, care about them, and work closely with them to ensure the absolute highest standards are always maintained. They may not always be the biggest name in their territory, but they’ve been hand-selected because we think they’re the best.

We think it’s our job to take full responsibility for the work they do, and unlike some other service providers, we shouldn’t use terms and conditions to absolve ourselves of responsibility for their work. We take full responsibility, end-to-end. That’s our philosophy.

But this creates an engineering problem. It means we need to understand far more than our competitors about the processes and regulations in each territory. At first, no professional indemnity insurance company could get their heads around the seemingly ludicrous risk, but once we presented the depth and extreme levels of diligence contained within our procedures and technology a few more progressive and intelligent insurers got it.

These things represent a level of detail and effort which are arguably disproportionate to the end result. But we just think it’s the right thing to do, no matter how challenging, and we keep pushing and finding solutions until these challenges are overcome.

As Nelson Mandela once said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

At present you offer European patent validation and patent renewals. Can you tell us more about what’s coming next? What is the ultimate aim?

We have a pretty clear vision of who and what we are, and what we’re trying to be. We don’t want to be an IP firm, or to perform the kinds of services which are fee-earning, consultative or grey areas. We don’t think we can be the best in the world at those and there are companies and professionals doing a far better job of that than we can. We’re interested in IP formalities—services which are binary: do it all 100% correctly and it gets done. Do it 99.9% correctly and it completely fails.

We want to support great IP formalities professionals and to make their daily lives much better, helping them to dramatically improve speed, cost, reliability, visibility—the whole thing. These guys have a tough job, we haven’t met a single IP formalities professional with enough hours in the day, and yet they can sometimes be forgotten.

This is why we focus our passion and effort on building the absolute finest possible services to support them, rather than on how to convince their superiors to sign a contract with us. We find they, and their superiors, are generally pretty smart, and don’t need their hands holding to be able to tell the difference!

What advice would you give to companies attempting to emulate IP Centrum’s record?

First job, stop relying on key performance indicators (KPIs). They’re a big favourite of corporations around the world, but all they tend to do is comfort a board that it’s OK to be imperfect, as long as we monitor how imperfect, and have someone responsible for reducing that imperfection.

It’s a polar different thing to truly set out to achieve a 100% record, which never drops below 100%.

This seems impossible, but it just isn’t, and we’ve proven that. The biggest mindset shift is to stop relying on the fact that human beings make mistakes as an excuse. If you build a service on the assumption that it will only be perfect if nobody makes any mistakes, then you are categorically deciding to launch a service which will fail at exactly the rate that humans make mistakes. You’ve given up before you begin.