Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. Popular culture likes to cultivate the myth of the maverick entrepreneur, often attributing the innovation in a company to a lone genius. The reality is that innovative companies cannot and should not rely on singular flashes of genius, but instead should build a culture of innovation from the ground up.

Building such a culture requires thoughtful incentive programs, sustained educational effort and effective intellectual property (IP) leadership.

The Importance of Layered Patent Protection

Just like it is unwise to create a single point of creative failure through reliance on one or two individuals, it is also unwise to create a single point of failure for a patent strategy. In practice, this means not relying on a single technical area for the protection of a product.

In the medical device sector, for example, most new products are a team effort, involving many different disciplines. Innovation is often required in more than one of those disciplines to develop a successful product.

In my prior role as in-house counsel, our company developed sweat-sensing devices that required innovations in microfluidics, electrochemical sensors, software and design, among other fields. By empowering our scientists, engineers and programmers to innovate and collaborate in and across these disciplines, we were rewarded when several of our most valuable patents—including one on a potentiometer and others on groundbreaking physiological testing methods—emerged unexpectedly from these hybrid, cross-field interactions.

The benefit of such a comprehensive strategy is that a single product may be protected by a web of related patents, not merely by a lone patent in a single area of innovation. Layering patent protection through multiple patent types and claim sets can prove crucial, since that lone patent may be an attractive target for a well-funded opportunist trying to appropriate someone else’s hard-won technology.

Creating and…