IP, Globalization, and the Future of Supply Chains: A Conversation with Sonja London

This week on this edition of IPWatchdog Unleashed, we speak with Sonja London. Sonia has been general counsel at TactoTek and before that she spent 14 years working for Nokia, where she oversaw Nokia's consumer electronics licensing, global licensing program for connectivity and video codecs, and was responsible for standardization. Sonja has spent the last year as President of Licensing Executives Society International (LESI), and her time in that role is winding down as LESI’s annual meeting in Singapore approaches at the end of April. 

We start our conversation talking about London’s experiences over the last year—the good, the bad and the ugly. “There's no ugly and no bad,” London said with a chuckle. 

As London was discussing her approach to running LESI, she explained that the goal of the organization is to bring the community together for the purpose of “advancing the commercialization of intellectual assets… not property only, but assets, to bring creativity and innovation to the market, improving lives everywhere.” This provoked me to ask, so we were all on the same page, about the distinction she was drawing between assets and property, which led us into a conversation about the importance of trade secrets and know how. 

We move on to discuss culture, and lesson London learned as she has visited more than a dozen countries in her time as President of LESI over the last year. We discussed technology generally, and specifically within the automotive sector and how we are starting to see even the automotive sector new companies challenge the long-time incumbent players by rethinking the technology from the ground up. This led a conversation about agile development of technologies. And then we inevitably found our way to the most pressing business issue of the moment, the likely reordering of global trade and shifting supply chains, which very refreshingly we discussed in an apolitical, thoughtful way were we both expressed hope for the future, whatever that is going to look like. 

Our conversation weaved in and out of what is happening the moment, to lessons from the past, with both of us discussing lessons learned regarding agile development and businesses pivoting at a moment of existential thread during World War II. We also discussed the breakdown in supply chains during COVID, which caused great business disruption as the weak link in the supply chain inflicted delay and lost commerce. We discuss TRIPS and looking at the current global trade issues as an opportunity, even if it isn’t readily apparent what that opportunity is at the moment or who will have been able to seize it when we look back with the perspective of months, years or decades.

If global business, current affairs and intellectual property are of interest to you I strongly recommend you listen to my conversation with Sonja London. 

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