San Francisco, Calif. December 28th, 2009 (Zusha Elinson) — Joe Beyers turned patents into a money-making operation at Hewlett-Packard Co. before it
was fashionable. Now he's planning to do the same thing at the helm of a smaller company. HP shifted its intellectual property operation into its legal
department earlier this year, and Beyers left to become CEO of Ambature LLC, which is developing and licensing intellectual property in the clean-tech arena.
"He was really a pioneer in moving the IP value extraction out of the legal department and creating it as a profit center," said Ronald Laurie, a consultant with Inflexion Point Strategy LLC. "Joe was sort of the poster child of treating IP as a business as opposed to risk management."

In 34 years at HP, Beyers rose from engineer to the head of M&A and technology partnership activities, finally becoming the top dog of the IP group, which was created in 2003 to monetize the company's thousands of patents. Beyers is not a lawyer, but under his leadership, HP went on the offensive. It sued Gateway and Acer Inc. for patent infringement, and it cut licensing deals with others. Beyers said that the IP group grew to about 50 people and its revenue grew by a factor of 10. Although neither he nor HP would give actual numbers, Beyers told CNET in 2005 that revenue from the group had grown from $50 million to $200 million in just two years. "It was very insightful of the board to start this kind of function," Beyers, a careful man, told The Recorder this month.

Beyers said he left HP in August for the opportunity to join Ambature, which develops intellectual property aimed at improving electrical efficiency, calling it "a chance to do an activity that is very high risk but has a chance to be very disruptive." He said he understood the decision last year to move his IP unit, which formerly reported to Shane Robison, chief strategy and technology officer, into the legal department under General Counsel Michael Holston. The move came as HP has grown and Holston has shaken up the legal department, which caused many veterans to hit the exits. Beyers said the shift means that there's a "different level risk" that the group is willing to take, which he said is "appropriate" given HP's growth. Beyers said his leaving had everything to do with the new opportunity and called his career at HP "phenomenal."

An HP spokeswoman explained that combining the IP and legal groups was just the logical move. "Given the nature of the business, the HP intellectual property and licensing group has historically worked closely with HP's legal department," she wrote in an e-mail. "The current organizational structure is intended to foster this existing relationship, streamline processes and better leverage the IP expertise existing across the company's legal team."
Consultant Laurie said it signals a trend — many big companies moved to create separate IP groups in the last five years, but not many have kept up the efforts.
"Unless you're an IP company like Rambus or Tessera, at some point the relative contribution of the IP business, it just pales in comparison to the potential problems," said Laurie. Laurie cited problems such as patents being sold and then coming back to bite your customers.

Beyers wasn't just HP's IP point man on offense. At the forefront of the defense, Beyers spoke out against so-called "patent trolls," companies whose only business is buying patents and suing companies that actually make things, writing a call to arms for CNET in 2005. In the article, Beyers wrote, "It's time for the industry to deal with the trolls' threat."

Although arguably HP's intellectual property group was acting much like a troll, Beyers began to organize against patent trolls. He made HP a founding member of Allied Security Trust, a group of companies that came together to buy "dangerous" patents and license them before trolls got ahold of them.
Asked whether the shoe was now on the other foot, Beyers said that Ambature — which has 10 employees and 10 contractors — will be in the business of innovating, not trolling.

"The material that we're creating will be pervasive," Beyers said. "It's enabling new capabilities that don't exist today."

(from http://www.callaw.com)