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company reaps rewards
Engineering company reaps rewards
L&R Ashbolt, a highly specialised surface engineering company, is reaping
the benefits of smart intellectual property (IP) strategies as it competes in
a global and extremely competitive market.
Wollongong-based L&R Ashbolt identifies potential cost saving areas for
a company through enhancement of the surface characteristics of components.
By reducing the wear and tear and corrosion, and increasing the durability of
surfaces in heavy engineering environments such as paper mills, petroleum and
power stations, clients enjoy a dramatic reduction of costs in the order of
millions of dollars.
L&R Ashbolt is recognised as a world leader and a pioneer in its field.
Orders come from all around Australia and from many parts of the world, making
it a truly global engineering company. The R&D team is constantly investigating
new methods to alter the surface characteristics of materials. Employing 42
people, the company has sales offices in Newcastle and Perth as well as its
head office in Wollongong.
According to Danny Ashbolt, L&R Ashbolt's general manager, the company's
success has been driven by the development of intellectual property. 'Patenting
and intellectual property are challenges for our company,' he says. L&R
Ashbolt currently owns two official patents, but Ashbolt believes the company
must now invest even more resources in intellectual property because the industry
has become so IP-intensive. 'Information dissemination is so rapid in our society
today-particularly with the Internet-and now there is an even greater need for
protection of ideas,' he says.
'My father lost potentially millions of dollars when he founded the company
in 1972,' Ashbolt explains. 'Back then, people were not so aware of the importance
of intellectual property and trade secrets. He developed technology for BHP
to coat the inside of blast furnaces which extended their life by a factor of
two, and it is now an accepted standard around the world. But BHP took that
technology in-house and my father got no recognition or financial reward.'
Ashbolt says there are many things L&R Ashbolt could have patented over
the years, but didn't because it didn't want its competitors to have access
to the information and copy it. 'I believe progress is very much about learning
from each other, but it's a delicate balance,' he says. 'Our competitors have
copied us on a number of occasions and of course that has scared us.'
Managing IP is absolutely vital for a company's growth and development, notes
Ashbolt. 'The lack of seed capital has always been big problem in Australia,
and this has resulted in great ideas being bought by overseas companies,' he
says. 'We have a great base of IP in Australia, and I believe this is the key
to our future.'
Ashbolt and his team of five R&D staff, all experts in their field, use
the services of IP Australia to carry out extensive patent searches in Japan,
the UK, the US and other countries. 'I think it is important not to reinvent
the wheel,' he says. 'IP Australia's patent search facility ensures we won't
waste valuable time and dollars developing something on which someone else has
spent $100,000 and two years. We don't copy patents that already exist-they
just give us an idea of a direction we could follow and improve on. Examining
competitors' patents also provides us with invaluable marketing knowledge.'
L&R Ashbolt personnel attend conferences in the US, Europe and South Africa,
and the company has a strategic relationship with a Japanese company in the
same market. 'We don't encroach on their markets nor they on ours, and to date
we've worked well together,' Ashbolt says. 'However, the market is becoming
more global so everyone is starting to compete, and relationships will probably
have to change.'
Ashbolt notes that Australian companies need to place more importance on the
value of IP and be smart about it, using it to their advantage. 'IP is one of
those intangible assets of a company,' he says. 'People become fixated on the
tangibles and forget to look at the bigger picture. IP is one of the strong
driving forces behind the successful growth of a company. There are many things
we can't control in a business-but we can control IP.'
'Unfortunately, many companies take the short-term view that IP is costly,
but it is vital to have a long-term view,' Ashbolt says. 'It's about being sensible.
For example, a company should lodge a patent only in the specific countries
where it will be doing business because it may be a complete waste of money
lodging it around the world. You have to be sensible and realistic about where
the future of the product lies.'
Ashbolt believes that IP Australia is an essential aide to those companies
needing direction and guidance through the complexities of IP, and that it has
greatly improved its range of offerings to the IP-naive individual and company.
IP Australia has done a lot recently to make it much easier to search for patents,
and to apply for and lodge them, he says. 'It has reduced the paperwork overload.
It is adapting to its customers and to the businesses that really need it. And
as a result, businesses are starting to listen.'
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