Oxa’s non-attorney Head of IP’s holistic approach to IP strategy and competitive analysis
December 16, 2024 | 5 min min readSpun out from Oxford University in 2014, Series C startup Oxa’s vision is for Universal Autonomy™: software that enables any vehicle to operate autonomously in any place at any time. Alex Tame has been Oxa’s Head of Licensing and IP Management since 2019. It’s a role that lets him see “some of the coolest technology” in an industry that he predicts will be “one of the biggest in the long-term.”
Alex is out of the ordinary as an IP leader in that he isn’t an attorney, and his approach to IP is just as unique. On the surface, Alex describes Oxa’s IP strategy with two straightforward questions: How do we grow the value of our IP by protecting the right things? And how do we maintain that value by minimizing risk? Peel back those layers, however, and Alex’s nontraditional thinking becomes apparent.
The core pillars of Alex’s holistic and dynamic approach to IP
IP means intangible assets To Alex, everything a company creates is IP, from documents or presentations, code, or databases. A company’s IP isn’t just its patents, trade secrets, copyrights, or trademarks.
Legal protection is expensive, confidentiality is free When most companies are just starting (Alex joined Oxa with the remit to help them win investment rounds from an IP perspective), they can’t afford legal protections like patents, which Alex calls “a long-term game.” What companies can do instead is keep things confidential through trade secrets. By default, everything Oxa creates is confidential — decisions to disclose information to the public and on a broad basis internally are made very carefully. Stay tuned for part 2 of my conversation with Alex for more on how he manages trade secrets.
As a company grows, its key assets change Just as the affordability of legal protection changes as a company gets bigger, so does its balance of key assets. “In smaller companies, there’s a select group of individuals who are critical to the success of a company because they understand the deeply technical foundations of what you’re building,” Alex explains. “Then, you’ve got your reputation: with customers, suppliers, staff, and ecosystem, which is essentially how you make money. Reputation only affects bigger companies because startups haven’t got any.”
Employee turnover is an often-overlooked risk Alex devotes a lot of his time monitoring the people risk in his industry by asking questions like: How do we know when people leave? What is our offboarding policy? Where have our inventors gone after they’ve left the organization? Are they inventing at other companies? How are their careers progressing? Where did new hires work before?
Another quality that makes Alex stand out as an IP leader is his use of technology. As a team of one, he uses AI “quite a lot.” For competitive research, he uses multiple platforms to piece together views of Oxa’s competitors that are just as multifaceted and people-driven as his IP strategy.
How Alex uses AI and multiple technology platforms for competitive research
AI According to Alex, “AI has its place to help with a whole raft of stuff.” He uses it to “save time writing documents, summarize information, create templates, ideate, and think through issues.” This has looked like:
• Getting 60% of the work done on a general policy on IP or trade secrets by receiving a draft, or a template as a starting point for an IP asset register for a project.
• Summarizing Oxa’s 40 patent families all the way down to a one-paragraph executive summary. Says Alex, “It’s amazing how AI can provide something that my inventors will validate as true to the invention and my managers can understand.”
• Covering gaps by asking for suggestions on managing certain situations, like an employee joining the organization from a competitor or deciding what metrics to report on.
Along with these AI use cases, Alex demonstrated his tech savvy by also sharing a word of caution: don’t put any confidential information into a tool you don’t have a private relationship with. If it’s a general AI tool, use it only for information that’s public domain. Read more about the difference between public and private AI for IP on Tradespace’s blog.
Competitive research Alex uses a number of platforms including Wellspring Scout, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and job boards to research and assign risk profiles of high, medium, or low to competitors. Below are some of the questions he asks when doing competitive analysis.
• Basics Who are they? Where are they located?
• Funding What rounds have they been through? How well-funded are they? Who are the investors? Are they corporate, individuals, or institutional? This information will also give you an idea of the investors most interested in your market.
• Finances Are they making money? Where? Have they invested in other companies or done any divesting?
• Patents and trademarks What’s the overall size of their patent portfolio? Has it gone up over time? Do they tend to file new patents around new rounds of funding? Says Alex, “Putting the timeline together of when funding events happen and how that affects IP can give you very interesting insights into how companies behave and where their focus is.”
• Litigation What is their litigation history? “Looking at a company’s litigation history versus what they’ve put in the public domain gives you more clues about how they’re behaving,” Alex explains. “For example, one of our competitors is Series C and hasn’t filed any patent applications but has had a trademark dispute.”
• Recruitment What technical skills and divisions are they recruiting for? “I spend a lot of my time reading competitors’ recruitment boards because you can often see what technical skills they’re recruiting for and where their technical roadmap is going. And if they put down which division the jobs are in, you’ve got the org chart.”
• People Who’s their senior leadership? Key engineers? Where did they work previously? Were they named as inventors or patent holders at their past companies?
Even though Alex is adept at using technology to find inputs, he notes that “this work takes time and thinking.” Various platforms might make it easier to find better information and even do the initial synthesis for you, but the concluding analysis still comes from the professional using them.
I learned a lot talking to Alex, who goes to show that “outsider” perspectives can be extremely valuable. Alex certainly doesn’t feel like an IP outsider to me though, with his smart take on protecting tangible assets throughout different growth stages, people-centric view of companies and strategies, and all-angles method for competitive analysis. Our conversation was so full of diverse insights that it’s being published in two parts. Part 2 with Alex on trade secrets, portfolio strategy, software patenting, and mentorship is coming soon.
