Last month Rob McLean and I represented the ICM Gathering at the IC Congress sponsored by InHolland University in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The Congress was billed as a joint business and academic event but turned out to be largely attended by people from Europen academia, with the papers largely contributed by junior people. I was dismayed to see that virtually all of the academic work presented had no relevance for business or for practitioners of IP/IC management. I think it a tremendous misallocation of societal resources that so many bright young academics are being guided in a direction in which their work will never influence practice. While I don't think this needs to be the case, I learned to my sorrow that it is.

My own contribution to the Congress was a paper on “The IC Community We Want”, including my thoughts on the need for a linkage between the needs of practicioners in the business world and the list of potential research topics academics might pursue. It was only afterward, on the plane home, that I asked myself what actions I might take to improve this situation. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that I could at least offer a challenge to our community to do two things. First, create a channel between business and academia where a list of important issues in need of research or examination could be made accessible to senior academics; perhaps, so they might use it to suggest topics to their aspiring PhD students, topics for doctoral research. . .we might use the new G2.0 website as one such channel.

The second thing, an obvious extension from the first, is to populate and to maintain a current a list of topics that we (the business community) would like to see tackled by someone with the time and intellectual resources necessary to explore the topics in some depth. That said, let me put the first daub of paint on this as yet empty canvas. . . . . herewith are some starter ideas. . . . . not in any particular order . . . . . I hope others will add to this list:

• What are we/can we be doing to collectively defend against the new “asserters”? 
• Are we investing the “best” amount in creating value extraction capabilities?
• Are we generating break-through innovations using our IC? Do we want to?
• Could there be a standard glossary of terms for all of IC management?
• What are alternative mechanisms we should use to bridge the business/academia chasm?
• How can we develop standards for valuation of intangibles?
• How can we create an environment in which our academic community can do quality forward-looking academic research?
• How can we bridge the chasms between the several different silo-ed disciplines involved with IC Management?

Please e-mail me your ideas on topics which should be included on the list. My e-mail is: psullivan@icmginc.com