Innovation is the principal element that drives economic progress.  Without innovation, technology creation and development stagnate, leading to a decrease in productivity growth.  History has demonstrated that those that focus on fostering, driving and protecting innovation, create tremendous long-term economic growth and shareholder value.  Such innovation-driven economic growth cycles can be traced all the way back from ancient history to today’s rapidly evolving technological advances.  Empires, nations, companies have all seen the benefits of this cycle; our collective future success and security depends on continuing innovation.

However, innovation requires incentive.  Without ownership and protection, solutions can still be found, but typically tend to be incremental or inconsequential.  The reason for this is simple:  when creative ideas are freely copied without consequence and innovators are not rewarded for their creativity, the risk/reward for development tips to imitation or incremental improvement.  

Innovative ideas can come from very small groups and, without protection, such innovation becomes economically prohibitive to all but the largest corporations.  Such large entities tend to become complacent when they only have one or two major other large competitors to worry about and as a result, technology advances more slowly and eventually begins to stagnate.  Therefore, it is critical to protect innovative technology by creating patents that describe and claim the innovative concepts.  Once innovators understand they can own the technology they created and receive an attractive economic incentive for its creation, they are much more willing to continue and even increase their development efforts.  This, in turn, attracts third-party investment into such technology and the result is the beginning of strong economic growth. 

WiLAN has been an innovation-focused company since its founding in the early 1990s and continues to contribute with the development and licensing of new technology solutions to this day.  In addition, WiLAN partners with companies of all sizes from around the world to provide its licensing expertise and create real monetary value for their intellectual property.