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Do We Worry Too Much About Protecting IP?

--> By Scott McNealy

It seems as if everyone’s always worried about intellectual property, or IP. We worry about its proprietary nature and how to protect it. But let’s take a different angle on IP and also intellectual capital inside a company, because I think we all worry way too much about protecting it.

IP has the shelf life of a banana. It just doesn’t last, yet we’re all worried about protecting it, hiding it, securing it, storing it in a vault. As a result, we absolutely prevent our competitors from getting ahold of it, but we also prevent our employees from getting ahold of it. We prevent our customers — and our suppliers and our partners — from getting access to it. As a result, by the time the people who need access to it get that access, it’s so old that it is effectively a banana we wouldn’t want to eat.

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