

DONAL O’CONNELL
Donal O’Connell is the Managing Director of Chawton Innovation Services Limited. The company offers consultancy in the areas of innovation and intellectual property management.
In the past year, the client base has included leading Universities, a global IP service provider, a selection of major IP Firms, a global telecoms company, a compliance firm and some global chemical companies. There has also been a global food and beverages company, a global heavy engineering company, one of the big four financial services companies, plus a variety of SMEs.
The projects have included IP process development, corporate IP department auditing, benchmarking across a variety of IP topics and assisting with IP Agent management. Other projects on various topics include research into NPEs, addressing work backlog within a corporate IP department, offering guidance on the outsourcing of various IP tasks, helping solve IP data management system issues and auditing a company’s compliance as part of an M&A deal. Additionally there have also been MBA course lectures and educating a company about basic IP, IP Portfolio Management and IP Management Training.
Donal graduated from NIHE Limerick (now The University of Limerick) in Ireland in 1985, with a Degree in Electronic Engineering.
Donal had a long career at Nokia for 21 years and has a wide and varied experience in the wireless telecoms industry, having worked for periods in The Netherlands, UK, USA, Finland, and HK.
Donal is a former VP of R&D and Director of IP at Nokia. In the US he was manager of Nokia R&D in Texas from 1997 to 2003, growing the site from scratch by recruiting and developing more than 600 engineers and developing and launching many successful products. More recently, from 2003 to 2009, Donal was a Director of IP at Nokia and was the leader of Nokia’s Patent Creation team. During this time period he successfully managed a number of major change projects. As well as being responsible for the creation of new patents, the team also had responsibility for 3rd party patent risk mitigation, IP Agent network management, and IP processes, systems and tools.
Donal has been a member of the Executive Board of the Eco Patent Commons initiative as well as Chair of the CPA Global Memotech IUG.
Donal has written two books called “Inside the Patent Factory” and most recently "Harvesting External Innovation" on the subject of collaborative innovation and IP, published by Gower in June 2011.
Donal is an Adjunct Professor at Imperial College, London.