Are You On The Right Side of Payments Innovation?

Are You On The Right Side Of Payments and Retail Innovation?

Participants who attend the PYMNTS Summer School deep dive on Retail Reinvention, on August 12 – 14 on the campus of Harvard University, will not only know how to answer that question for their companies, but will understand precisely what to do if the answer is no.  By being the first to see the results of a powerful new proprietary innovation-benchmarking tool that measures exactly where the most valuable innovation in payments and commerce is taking place. Attendees will be able to more accurately align their own resources with where the opportunity for innovation is most relevant for their organizations and their customers.

Here’s the basic premise.

As we all know, igniting innovation in payments is about finding the common ground between an innovators’ belief that their innovation is the best thing since sliced bread and a consumers and merchant’s belief that change is too painful. Ignition happens only when enough consumers and enough merchants have not only been convinced that change is worth it. One Harvard Business School Professor has put metrics around this hypothesis suggesting that anything new has to offer value that is 9 times better than what exists presently. Who’s to know whether 9 is the right number, but you get the point.

Innovators have their own metrics for determining how valuable they think their innovation really is. One of those metrics is patents.

Patents are tangible proof of the ownership of unique intellectual property. As a result, innovators new and existing rush to file patents right and left to create competitive advantage.  It’s also been held out as a benchmark for how innovative an established technology company is and why headlines are made  whenever players like Apple, Google, Visa, MasterCard, Intel, Facebook, IBM, PayPal file them.  But does that mean that those companies – and those patents – will yield innovation that is nine times better than the status quo?

Most of the time, the answer is no.

Nils Omland is the co-Founder of PatentSight, a company that has created something called the Patent Asset Index (PAI). PAI is the technology industry’s most powerful way of measuring the value of a patent and a company’s patent portfolio. PatentSight and PAI has earned the trust of CTOs worldwide in helping to isolate where the “innovative” patent gems really are in a company and how to maximize those assets. The result of this analysis over thousands of companies and millions of patents has been one sobering reality: most of the patents that exist aren’t as “game-changing” as they might otherwise appear.  And, using those patents as benchmarks for what others should do to “catch up” isn’t the right way to chase innovation.

Nils and PatentSight has teamed with PYMNTS and Market Platform Dynamics to apply his PAI  methodology to the patents of the 100 most innovative players in payments and commerce in order to see where innovators, new and existing, are placing their bets and how influential those patents are in driving innovation in payments and retail. Those preliminary results will be shared with PYMNTS Summer School deep dive participants.

PatentSight is but one input into the PYMNTS Innovation Readiness Index which provides the first ever measurement of payments and commerce ecosystem’s ability to enable innovation and the role of each of the players in it. The Innovation Readiness Index will be released on January 2, 2015 and is being done under the guidance of some of the leading innovation experts in the world working with the Market Platform Dynamics team. PYMNTS Summer School deep dive participants who also become part of the benchmarking study will be eligible to participate in a full day briefing with some of these experts to further dissect the results for their company and the sector in which they directly compete.

So, get ready to change the way that you think about innovation and the various ways that innovation is measured and benchmarked.

Can you really afford to miss out?

Register here and register now!