LES Standards

The Licensing Executive Society Standards Development Organization (LES SDO) is soliciting volunteers to join our Standards setting Committees as well as the Consensus Body Partnership (CSP). Any interested parties are invited to join the LES SDO or the CSP by applying for a LES Standards Enterprise membership or CSP membership.  Please read below to learn more about our Committees.  The cost for joining the SDO is $500 and the CSP is $250.  An Enterprise Membership includes a CSP membership.  Be a part of creating a first American National Standard on IP!  If you have any questions, please contact Brooke Weldon at bweldon@les.org.

Join us today! 

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To join as a Standards Enterprise Member online click here

Download LES Standards Policy and Procedures Manual for American National Standards here 

Download LES Standards Volunteer Disclosure of Interest and Copyright License Agreement here

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Member

Purpose

The purpose of all LES standards in the field of intellectual capital (IC) management is to develop management frameworks and business process standards that accomplish one or more of the following objectives:

• Make good IC management and transaction practice more understandable and accessible throughout the enterprise, from the boardroom down to individual contributors
• Improve the practice of IC management and, by doing so, enhance shareholder value  and mitigate litigation risk through the establishment of safe harbors
• Enhance the efficiency of and reduce the cost and time required to do IC transactions and management
• Establish expectations for how an enterprise manages and protects IC in its relationships with third parties
• Protect and preserve IC value for innovative individuals and enterprises
• Encourage investment in innovation and enhance the economic well-being of society

Background

Across the world, innovation is the principal source of differentiated and defensible competitive advantage for individuals and enterprises. Innovation is the basis of advantaged products and services, and it drives sales and profits. It is the source of jobs. It is the engine of the global economy. Yet the intricacies of IC management are not well-understood by our political, financial, and business leaders.

In addition, in business schools around the world, IC management is not treated seriously as a business subject. In fact, to the extent it is dealt with at all, IC management is taught as a legal subject, not as the management of the largest component of value in the modern enterprise (i.e. 80 percent of the equity value of publicly traded companies). IC valuation, the business processes employed in IC management (both risk mitigation and value extraction), IC sharing and protection with third parties, and IC strategy are barely touched upon.

IC and its value are, therefore, nearly invisible to most of our business, financial, and political leaders and thinkers. They have little, if any, grounding in it. There is little accounting for it. And very often, no one outside the legal department has explicit responsibility for its protection and management.

Benefit of LES Standards

LES standards are voluntary consensus-based professional practices that are guided in their development by the "American National Standards Institute's (ANSI's) Essential Requirements."  (ANSI is the unique accrediting agency in the United States for voluntary consensus standards development organizations.)  LES is an accredited ANSI Standards Developer (ASD) and as such guarantees its constituents that its standards will be developed in a fair, balanced, consensus-based, due process driven way.

LES standards are designed to encourage and teach consensus practices in many of the business process aspects of IC management and, where appropriate, offer enterprises the opportunity to differentiate themselves based on their use of these consensus professional practices, through certification of conformance to those standards.  LES standards will be to the practice of IC management what ISO 9001 is to the practice of quality management.

Areas of Standards Development

Eight standards sub-committees have been established, creating working groups, to draft standards in the following areas:

ISO/TC 279 Innovation Management

• Advancing best practices in innovation management and ensuring coherence and alignment with existing management process standards

IP Protection in the Supply Chain

• Providing a management system approach and controls for organizations to augment the typical legal means used today for protecting IP between organizations

FRAND Licensing

• Creating an industry-wide, business process standard for businesses and professionals engaged in licensing standard essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, thereby reducing transaction costs and management expenses
• View list of Committee members here
• Read the Committee Q&A with Co-Chairs Matteo Sabattini & Brian Scarpelli

IP Licensing

• Developing a standard for parties' interactions in licensing intellectual property, thereby enhancing efficiency and trust and reducing the need for additional litigation and legislation and regulation in this field

IP Management for Startups

• Developing a standard that is intended to enhance the value of early stage enterprises (at funding and at exit), reduce IP risk, and reduce costs for entities that adopt and practice the standard in connection with securing and protecting their intellectual assets

Intellectual Capital in the Boardroom

• Creating a standard for boards of directors to enhance value and mitigate risk associated with intangible assets

IP Valuation

• Providing a multi-tiered, scenario-based standard for selecting and applying IP valuation approaches for a wide variety of situations

IP Brokerage

• Creating transaction-centered business process requirements for agents, buyers, and sellers of IP assets

The standards areas listed for each committee above are suggestions for consideration of the committees. It will be up to the committees to decide what areas they would like to work on (and in what order it would be best to work on them) to achieve the purposes of the LES Standards Program. It is important to keep in mind that all journeys begin with relatively small steps, and this will likely be the case with LES Standards development work. The earlier standards may be easier to develop consensus on than standards developed several years from now.

Will there be additional standards committees that we will want to establish over time? Yes, certainly. One broad area that comes to mind is IP valuation. There will be others.

The Cost of LES Standards Participation*

There are two ways that you can get involved: 

1. Enterprise Membership: Click here to join
   There will be an annual membership fee of $500 charged to each enterprise that participates in an LES Standards committee. For that flat fee, each enterprise may provide as many participants as it likes and may participate in as many committees as it likes. However, there will only be one representative from an enterprise empowered to vote on each committee's work.
   
   The value proposition for companies considering an LES Standards Enterprise Membership is the following:
   • LES Standards Enterprise Members will have a chance to help set LES's standards strategies and to shape the draft standards themselves, thus ensuring that they have a voice at the table in the early stages
   • By being involved early on, LES Standards Enterprise Members will have early insight into and a head start on implementation and compliance
   • LES Standards Enterprise Members will be able to purchase copies of the published standards and will be able to register for LES standards training at deeper discounts than others
   We are charging an LES Standards annual enterprise membership fee because we have to hire additional staff to support the work, to purchase software that we do not have, and to incur additional related costs. It is important to know that other standards development organizations (SDOs) have similar fee levels.
   
   Please keep in mind that these fees enable an enterprise's named participants to participate in the LES Standards committees. Individuals wanting membership access to other LES resources (such as the royalty rate surveys, the compensation survey, the searchable LES library of meeting content going back many years, a searchable database of archived LES Nouvelles articles, the LES membership directory, and LES webinars) will need to take out an individual LES membership.
   
   
2. Consensus Standards Partnership Membership: Click here to join
   The LES Consensus Standards Partnership (CSP) serves as the final consensus voting body for approval or disapproval of any LES standard. Membership at this level affords a single member of your organization the opportunity to vote on the standards, but not to participate on the standards development committees.
   $250 per organization* annually

Conclusion

Until now, the IP management community—the community of experts in IP management—has not organized itself to speak with one voice in answer to urgent queries from around the world as to what should be done in the licensing of patents, what should be done in the selling of patents, what should be done from a business process perspective to protect other-party IP. It has not organized itself to develop and implement scenario-based standards of IP valuation, standards of enterprise conduct in IP transactions, IP agreement template standards, and so forth. This is a short-coming that we need to fix.

The IP management community needs to come together in an open, fair, and balanced way—under the rules of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)—to answer those queries being made of the legislatures and courts around the world and of the IP management community in its current disarray. The IP management community will come together in the LES Standards Program to begin the process of answering these and many other urgent and important questions that politicians, judges, juries, business leaders, financial leaders, citizens, inventors, entrepreneurs, and enterprises of all kinds have been wrestling with for many years.

LES encourages all organizations and individuals who have a stake in the answers to participate in the LES Standards development process. LES is moving forward to set up a process in which everyone around the globe is welcome to participate, whether a governmental organization or agency, an educational institution, a consulting company, a law firm, a sole proprietor, a product company, a services company, or any other professional group.

We look forward to working together with you and your organization as we focus on the critical questions an IP-based world economy demands to have answered. And we promise that the very best minds in the IP management community will be enlisted to lead us to success in this significant task.

Click here to join as a Standards Enterprise Member.

To join as a CSP member only (Membership at this level affords a single member of your organization the opportunity to vote on the standards, but not to participate on the standards development committees.) click here

*Standards Membership is NOT LES Membership. LES Membership can be purchased individually for $395. For information about LES Membership, please click here.

LES Standards Leadership