Douglas Graham
Managing Director, Open Innovation Society, New York, NY, USA

Innovation executives are emerging in executive suites throughout the world and in addition many nations are appointing ‘Ministers of Innovation’. This is due to increasing recognition of the importance of innovation to future shareholder value as well as concerns related to protecting their IP from internal and external threats as well as concerns over assuring ‘Freedom to Operate’. However, the role is so new that often there is little in the way of an adequate job description. This article lays out the basics of the missing job description in terms of their responsibilities. These include finding innovation throughout their enterprise, protecting it, facilitating it, reducing R&D costs, increasing licensing revenues, protection from ‘trolls’, modeling IP economic flows, enabling disposition decisions, managing patent committee, strengthening legal position, and globalizing market protection.