Donal has written two books on the subjects of patent creation and innovation.  The first booked called “Inside the Patent Factory”, which was published in April 2008 by Wiley & Sons.  His second book, "Harvesting External Innovation", on the subject of innovation and IP was published by Gower in June 2011.  More information can be found from the Ashgate Publishing Group Web site and the book is available to purchase at Amazon.

"A fundamental change in the way organisations approach innovation is taking place.  It involves cooperating and collaborating with external parties in the area of innovation and in the research and development of products and services and is driven by the simple realisation that not all the smart people work for just one organisation – it is necessary to work with smart people outside the company." (Gower) 

Collaborative innovation is reliant on some form of management and control.  Intellectual property is the means to manage knowledge-based collaborations, as knowledge and technology needs to be managed as transactions of objects in the development stages, as these objects may now be as valuable, or even more valuable than the resulting products and services.  Patents can therefore be seen as a means to objectify knowledge, so it can be properly managed.

Without intellectual property and patent collaboration in technology, development becomes prohibitively difficult.  This is a fresher way of viewing patents, namely as a management system for knowledge-based business instead of a legal right to exclude others.