Video is everywhere, and in just about everything. This year, video content is projected to account for 82% of all internet traffic, according to CISCO’s Visual Networking Index. Entertainment is a large portion of that with its ubiquitous streaming services, but so is business, education, medicine, and many facets of industry. The list is long and growing.
The global pandemic accelerated this steady growth, with virtual meetings becoming the default mode of bringing businesspeople together, even after many have returned to the office. Likewise, most remote learning is entirely dependent on video technology, and enabled kids to continue school while stuck at home. Telehealth appointments became standard, and remain a preferred option for many healthcare providers and patients. Then there’s gaming, gambling, AR, VR, advertising, and more, all converging in an immersive metaverse, where conventional visual interface boundaries will blur and combine in a shared virtual world.
All of this, of course, is built on patented technology. But if the pace of innovation that enables these leaps forward is blisteringly fast, the patent system is anything but. The same is often also true of patent licensing programs — but not always.
“A lot of patent licensing organizations are reactive,” says Clay Gaetje from the Multimedia Licensing Team at Nokia. “They see a market develop, then go look for patents their company might have. That’s natural, but it ignores a valuable feedback loop from the licensing function into the innovation process. We’re very lucky that we have some of the smartest people in the world here at Nokia, and can be proactive and ready three, five, seven years ahead of when the market develops.”
That kind of foresight requires both a sound technological foundation and the vision to accurately project the uses of new and existing patents well into the future.
Technology Roadmap
Gaetje is no stranger to video. Before joining Nokia he worked at Xperi Corp., where among other things he ran the business unit responsible for worldwide Pay TV licensing. Prior to that he worked for Kudelski Group and Xperi’s prior corporate entities TiVo, Rovi, and Gemstar-TV Guide. He says the key to effective licensing in such a fast-moving space starts years in advance, when the technology is in its formative stages.
“We create a technology roadmap, based not only on Nokia, but also on our customers and industry leaders in our space. We want to make sure that as companies reinvent themselves — as they expand and morph into new versions of themselves — we understand what challenges they face and where they’re likely to head.”
In this regard, Nokia doesn’t just anticipate future licensing opportunities but actually helps current and prospective licensees better understand the evolution of their own space and opportunities based on a novel perspective and broad field of view.
“When I go talk to a licensee, we show a portfolio centered around the problems we’ve solved for them — where our innovations are the ones that made their lives easier for developing the markets they have and the identity they have,” Gaetje says. “That really hits at the core of who they are.”
Assessing a particular niche, Gaetje says, is more than a matter of looking at the industry leaders. It includes smaller companies that often drive technology forward and create new markets.
“We want to understand as well as they do what their technology roadmap is,” he says. “We’re thinking as if we were a CTO or an engineer at that company — deciding where it’s going and what technological problems it’s trying to solve. It helps that we’re playing in the industry as well.”
“We create a technology roadmap, based not only on Nokia, but also on our customers and industry leaders in our space. We want to make sure that as companies reinvent themselves — as they expand and morph into new versions of themselves — we understand what challenges they face and where they’re likely to head.”
Multimedia Licensing Team
Nokia
Building Blocks
Nokia’s patent portfolio breaks down into about 15 primary categories, including things like UX, video, SEPs, cloud storage, and edge caching patents. Under these, the portfolio has 50 to 70 subcategories, in which Nokia is either developing new IP internally, partnering in its development, or potentially acquiring it.
Using what Gaetje calls a “building block” approach, the licensing team assembles a structure tailored to the current and future needs of a licensee. The custom nature of this process is central to the company’s approach, because not every licensee uses the same technology in the same ways, and unique combinations of patents can fuel new products and help shape new markets.
Once the Nokia team has built a rough structure for a particular licensee, they test it for any possible weaknesses before presenting it.
“We look at what we have, then do a gap analysis to figure out what we don’t have,” Gaetje says. “It’s all about making sure we have the right portfolio when we go in front of a particular licensee. We try to get ahead of the industries before they develop. It can be a waiting game in some cases, but once it’s right, we can put together the blocks, the specific technologies and patents that apply directly to what they’re doing.”
By deconstructing a licensee’s system, Nokia is well prepared to discuss the ways it has invested in the technology that helped shape the licensee’s industry and business, and to have a constructive discussion about the future. This is a novel approach, Gaetje says.
“I’ve not seen this done successfully anywhere else,” he says. “We have the perfect place for doing this because we have both ends of the spectrum — innovative, smart people working at the cutting edge of developing technology, and a program ready to monetize those innovations. In my experience, you either have one or the other. You’re either innovating for a product or you’re licensing a patent — you don’t usually have both at the same time.”
Success hinges on focusing on the underlying technologies as opposed to the markets themselves. The hardest part is imagining where ideas will go.
Expect the Unexpected
Success in this approach hinges on focusing on the underlying technologies as opposed to the markets themselves, Gaetje says, calling evergreen and sustainable programs ”the holy grail of licensing.“ It’s only possible by looking to the future and placing significant investment in ideas that aren’t going to pay off for many years.
Even with that commitment, there are still challenges. Occasionally companies come out of nowhere and disrupt the entire industry.
“TikTok wasn’t on the radar three, four years ago, and now they’re ubiquitous and addictive, to the point where some studies show that it’s actually changing the brain chemistry of children,” he says. “You know the industry leaders, the Metas, the Googles. But then every so often, one comes out of nowhere.”
The biggest challenge, however, is simply putting boundaries around what you’ve already created, he says. No one can do everything for everybody, and companies must in some ways filter their technology capabilities to apply them most precisely and profitably. The hardest part of that is imagining where ideas will go.
“Market leaders become dinosaurs if they don’t evolve. The arc of that evolution is not always clear. Amazon went from selling books to selling everything including web services. Facebook morphed into Meta. Comcast dominated cable, then expanded into theme parks, studios, arenas — all things entertainment. And they’re investing beyond that, in fleet management, home automation, telemedicine,” Gaetje says. “We can’t be in every one of those spaces. Knowing that and trying to figure out which are the most important and where we can have the biggest impact is the real challenge.
“But the goal in doing that,” he concludes, “is to have sustainable relevance in our markets, leading to renewable revenue every year for as long as we can see the horizon.” 
