Insights from Future IP UK Experts Vol.12: Douglas Gordon on Building Effective IP Strategies
- Cosmonauts Team
- Oct 7
- 5 min read
Every year, Future IP UK brings together the minds shaping the future of Intellectual Property strategy, protection, and innovation.
We’re excited to welcome this year’s speakers - Douglas Gordon, UK Head of Intellectual Property at Leonardo, who will join the panel “Layered IP Strategies: Protecting Innovation Across Different IP Rights” and bring deep expertise in shaping IP functions that align directly with business goals.
With decades of experience managing complex IP portfolios across global industries, Douglas offers a clear-eyed perspective on how layered protection and strong communication can transform IP from a compliance function into a competitive advantage.
In this conversation, he explores the building blocks of a successful IP strategy, the resurgence of trade secrets, and the leadership role IP professionals must play in guiding business innovation.
How do you define a strong IP strategy, and what are the key elements that make it effective?
A strong IP strategy is one that enables the business to deliver on its strategic objectives. As Maria Boicova-Wynants wrote in her recently published book, The Psychology of IP: Why CEOs Ignore Their Lawyers (And how to fix this?), “Legal teams must position themselves not as guardians of abstract rights but as enablers of business success”.
My experience across my career is that enabling the strategic business objectives requires an understanding of many aspects of the wider business, including:
long-term business strategic objectives to guide filing strategies for registering IP rights,
technology strategy to establish IP ownership versus licensing requirements,
supply chain position and strategies to establish the correct balance between patent and trade secret protection,
Traditional and new market/technology entrants to establish freedom to operate and/or partnerships to accelerate time to market, and other considerations.
Once those considerations are understood, the mix of IP protections (patents, designs, trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, sui generis database rights, etc.) can be layered to deliver the IP effects that support the strategic business objectives.
Have you seen a bigger shift towards trade secrets in recent years? If so, why do you think that is?
Whilst there is certainly a general notable increase in both the volume and value of trade secret litigation across many industries, whether there has been a shift towards trade secrets is perhaps a more nuanced and interesting question.
Even before formal trade secret legislation existed in many countries, businesses had made strategic decisions not to disclose certain information and capabilities in patents. This was always an option, particularly when confidentiality, unfair competition, and similar legal protections were in place, especially if the information would not be accessible outside the business.
What has changed is:
There is an increasing volume of trade secret-specific legislation, increasing the protections offered and the penalties for misappropriating such assets
There is a volume of case law and demonstration of successful litigation resulting in the award of injunctions and damages, and even criminal sanctions being applied
Particularly in the US, we have seen the ability to enforce patents be reduced from recent history.
Given such changes, there is certainly a justification to seeing the attraction of trade secrets increasing.
Ultimately, trade secrets are just one IP tool for delivering an effective IP strategy to support the strategic business objectives, and they are not appropriate in every situation. The more recent legislative and successful enforcement actions have simply increased the confidence in a method for protecting proprietary information and capabilities that has been available for a very long time.
How can companies maintain trade secret protection in today’s remote and distributed work environments?
The international general statutory obligations for maintaining trade secrets is that they are:
Secret – not generally known or readily accessible
Valuable – it has commercial value because it is kept secret
Reasonably protected – via physical and electronic measures
So this all comes down to what are “reasonable” measures. This will change based on the organisation and set-up. Based on many conversations with fellow IP professionals and my broader IP experiences I would say the essential elements are:
Don’t share it: keep it on a need-to-know basis, and know who it has been shared with
Deliver education: make sure your employees know what the trade secrets that they have been given access to are, that they are valuable, and how they should handle them
Record your trade secrets: it is difficult to manage what you can’t define, plus the courts will not go hunting to identify your trade secrets for you, should the worst happen
Provide governance: make sure you have a policy on how trade secrets should be handled, and who should be trained, as well as what cyber protection and user access controls need to be deployed.
Contracts: make sure your contracts with employees, suppliers, and customers address confidentiality obligations, onward handling obligations, and the specific purpose for which the trade secrets can be used
How do you communicate the value of your IP portfolio with internal stakeholders?
The first questions that need to be answered is who those stakeholders are and what their objectives are. Communication, especially around IP, is about understanding the motivations and goals of those to whom you are communicating, and their preferences in terms of consuming information. Too often, we are in danger of preaching IP, but failing to consider the interest of the receiving party and how we make IP relevant to them.
The next important consideration is what value means. Whilst the C-Suite is often focused on financial outcomes, figures alone do not generate impetus for decision-making, which is ultimately what you are often seeking. Additionally, Engineering, Technology, and Legal will have distinct perspectives and priorities.
For the C-Suite, a combination of volumetric and financial metrics, along with stories that illustrate both the risk of loss and the opportunity potential, is what will convey the “value” or benefit that your organisation will derive from its IP portfolio.
UK businesses that invest significantly in UK-based R&D provide access to a very useful financial metric in the form of the UK Patent Box tax benefit. This in combination with IP coverage across core lines of business and engaging with Enterprise Risk management, creates the data-driven backdrop to the stories that can be told with IP around litigation, licensing, and communication to investors and customers as to the unique capabilities of products and services.
Other metrics could include IP licensing revenue, R&D investment covered by IP, or perhaps even the cost to the business that would have to be paid to license the equivalent IP, if we didn’t own it.
The one thing that you do have to be careful with is that any metric, or Key Performance Indicator (KPI), has the potential to be converted into objectives and generate unintended consequences of driving not only good but also undesirable behaviours.
What do you hope to take away from the Future IP UK? What makes attending these events worthwhile for you?
As with any conference, the ability to speak and listen to fellow IP professionals and those from adjacent areas of interest is the main appeal. I’m always looking for that fresh perspective, new insight, or to test my own views and validate that I am not introducing any bias into my own organisation’s IP function. Coming away with one or two good new insights is my litmus test for whether it has been a good conference, and I’m sure that Future IP UK will provide that.
As Douglas Gordon emphasises, an effective IP strategy is one that enables the business to achieve its goals—balancing protection with flexibility, and aligning legal frameworks with long-term strategic vision. By understanding how patents, trade secrets, and collaborative models work together, organisations can transform IP from a legal asset into a driver of innovation and competitive advantage.
Join Douglas and other leading experts at Future IP UK to explore how layered IP strategies can help businesses navigate complexity, safeguard creativity, and unlock commercial value.
Written by Min Nguyen, Content Executive
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