What does the name Marshall Phelps mean to you? To the intellectual property world, it is the reason IP is on the corporate map. He not only helped save IBM from bankruptcy and enabled Microsoft to make friends across the industry, but he also completely changed the way top management and board executives think about IP worldwide.
“I remember a time when I would walk around conferences, and I was viewed as a demigod because I had come up with this, but it was no big deal,” he says in an exclusive interview with ip fray. “It’s just what we did. I think the world is a better place if it figures out how to cooperate than if it doesn’t.”
Mr. Phelps eventually said goodbye to the IP monetization world in 2009. Since then, he has spent a lot of time in academia, teaching at Cornell Law School, Duke Business School, and Berkeley, among other places. He is also on a couple of boards and consults for nine companies.
He recently sat down with ip fray to discuss how Bill Gates persuaded him to come out of retirement and work for Microsoft, how he convinced IBM’s CEO in 1991 to view IP as an asset and not a cost center, and his top tips for IP executives struggling to get that message across to their C-suite today.
A phone call with Bill Gates
Marshall Phelps has held many roles in IP, but he is most famous for his 28 years at IBM, where he was its Director of Government Relations, Vice President of Asia Pacific operations, and, most notoriously, Vice President and head of IP. He then did a stint as Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft from 2003 to 2009.
His key highlights from his career include being legal counsel for the personal computer business at IBM and completely transforming the way Microsoft perceived IP.
Mr. Phelps initially retired in 2000, but it was a call from Bill Gates while he was on the golf course on a Saturday afternoon three years later that lured him back into the IP monetization business.
“‘Come and talk to me, I want to see what you can do for us,’ he told me,” he recalls. So he did. The two sat with their feet up on Mr. Gates’s desk on a Friday, and played “who do you know” all night. Mr. Phelps offered to join for a year and change everything about how Microsoft viewed IP. Mr. Gates agreed but asked for three years. He stayed for six.
In that time, Microsoft went from owning three patent applications to thousands. The department had grown substantially, and together they had built an entire “IP economy”. Before Mr. Phelps, the company had no alliances, no friends, and no partners. By the time he left, the company had made hundreds of friends by leveraging its IP.
The 250 red cellophane flags
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