Patent renewals: The space race

It looks like the lair of a Bond baddie, or perhaps more like NASA mission control. There are countdown clocks, giant maps of the world, flashing lights and a sleek design. There are also not very many desks.

Although this will eventually be a real operations room, it’s also the metaphorical embodiment of something that could be genuinely revolutionary: the physical architecture that underpins and represents a business, software and operational architecture designed for maximum performance.

IP Centrum seems to be aiming for nothing less than world domination—the ability to manage more renewals and validations instructions than anyone else in the market, and to do so with 100% success. As an ambition, it’s laudable; in practice, it’s difficult—the patent renewals operations launched last month after five years of preparation (initial plans were to do it in nine months). The operations room is the front end of this effort, the place at which software, people and the actual client work meet.

Upping the volume

Internally, it’s called the Lava Lake, and ultimately, it’s designed to facilitate scale and accuracy in tandem. The aim is to begin building soon, but in the meantime there’s a miniature version of the room, known as the Lava Puddle, in the company’s Birmingham offices.

There are several major challenges to running a successful renewals business, but perhaps chief among them is the sheer quantity of things that could feasibly go wrong per instruction, which when multiplied by the potentially huge number of matters under way at a given time, creates an organisational puzzle.

The challenge, especially for newer players in the market who are unlikely to be able to compete with the larger players on the basis of manpower even if they wanted to, is how to scale operations without risking the accuracy of the work.