Dear Readers, Strategists and Game-Changers,
Hope you are doing great!
As you know, last week, I walked through two extraordinary concentrations of scientific ambition, technological excellence and entrepreneurial energy: France Quantum and VivaTech.
I met brilliant scientists. I spoke with ambitious founders.
I saw quantum technologies leaving the laboratory, artificial intelligence entering every industry, space technologies reaching new levels of maturity, and DeepTech companies attempting to solve problems that would have appeared impossible only a decade ago.
I also saw investors, governments, research organisations and industrial leaders discussing the same strategic priorities: Innovation. Sovereignty. Competitiveness. Scale.
The energy was real. The technologies were real. The ambition was real.
And yet, one question remained with me:
How much of the value being created today will Europe ultimately retain tomorrow?
Because creating innovation and capturing its value are not the same thing.
A company may develop an exceptional technology and still fail to control the market it helped create.
A startup may hold several patents and still lack a defensible competitive position.
A research consortium may produce a breakthrough and still leave ownership, exploitation rights and strategic control dangerously fragmented.
A DeepTech company may raise millions while its most valuable know-how remains undocumented, unqualified and concentrated in the minds of a few key individuals.
Europe does not lack ideas. It does not lack scientists. It does not lack laboratories, patents, research programmes, accelerators or ambitious entrepreneurs.
Europe’s deeper problem is its recurring difficulty in transforming all that excellence into controlled, defensible, scalable and monetisable value.
In other words:
Europe does not primarily have an innovation problem. It has a value-capture problem.
We are creating more intangible value than ever before
The centre of gravity of the global economy has changed.
The most valuable assets of modern companies are increasingly intangible:
- inventions;
- patents;
- trade secrets;
- software;
- algorithms;
- databases;
- models;
- know-how;
- brands;
- designs;
- contractual rights;
- organisational processes;
- human expertise;
- industrial relationships;
- scientific credibility;
- and the capacity to innovate repeatedly.
According to World Intellectual Property Organization – WIPO , the worldwide value of corporate intangible assets exceeded USD 97 trillion in 2025, following growth of approximately 23% in a single year.
This is not a marginal change in accounting. It is a structural transformation of capitalism.
Factories still matter. Machines still matter. Infrastructure still matters.
But their value increasingly depends on the knowledge, software, data, intellectual property, expertise and organisational capabilities surrounding them.
A semiconductor fabrication facility is not valuable only because of its equipment.
A quantum computer is not valuable only because of its physical components.
A pharmaceutical company is not valuable only because it owns laboratories.
An artificial intelligence company is not valuable only because it owns servers.
The strategic value lies in the combination of tangible resources with an invisible architecture of knowledge and rights.
That invisible architecture is where modern competitive advantage is built. It is also where an enormous amount of value quietly disappears.
Innovation creates possibilities. Strategy determines who captures them.
Europe has traditionally been excellent at the beginning of the innovation chain.
We generate world-class research. We train exceptional engineers and scientists.
We build highly specialised technologies. We form sophisticated public-private research partnerships.
We publish. We invent. We patent. But innovation does not automatically become economic power.
Between the scientific breakthrough and the creation of a European industrial champion lies a complex process of transformation.
The innovation must be identified. Its ownership must be clarified. Its strategic components must be separated from its non-differentiating components.
The right combination of patents, trade secrets, copyright, designs, trademarks, contracts and controlled disclosure must be selected.
The technology must be connected to a product roadmap. The product roadmap must be connected to a market.
The resulting position must be understandable to investors, partners, customers and potential acquirers.
And the organisation must preserve its freedom to operate while preventing competitors from capturing the most valuable parts of what it has created.
This is not simply a legal exercise. It is not simply a patent exercise. It is not simply a technology-transfer exercise.
It is a strategic-management exercise.
Yet in many innovative companies, no executive is explicitly responsible for the complete process.
The patent portfolio is essential - but it is not the strategy
Let me be clear: patents can be extraordinarily powerful.
A well-designed patent portfolio can create exclusivity, strengthen negotiations, attract investment, support licensing, increase acquisition value and discourage imitation.
Patent attorneys and specialised intellectual-property firms therefore play an essential role in the innovation ecosystem.
But a collection of patents does not automatically constitute an intangible-assets strategy.
A patent may be technically strong but commercially peripheral.
It may cover yesterday’s research rather than tomorrow’s product.
It may protect an elegant technical solution without preventing competitors from reaching the same market through an alternative route.
It may disclose know-how that should partly have remained secret.
It may be filed in countries that do not correspond to the company’s manufacturing, commercial or enforcement priorities.
It may be jointly owned under conditions that make exploitation or enforcement difficult.
It may protect the technology without protecting the data, software, processes, relationships or expertise required to operate it successfully.
Conversely, a company may possess relatively few patents but control powerful trade secrets, unique datasets, difficult-to-reproduce processes, highly specialised human expertise and privileged commercial relationships.
The strategic question is therefore not:
How many patents do we have?
It is:
Which combination of intangible assets gives us control over the value chain that matters to our business?
Patents are instruments. Trade secrets are instruments. Copyright, contracts, designs, trademarks and technical standards are instruments. Open-source strategies can also be instruments.
None of them should become the strategy in isolation.
The strategy begins with the business objective.
The hidden forms of value leakage
Value leakage rarely announces itself. It does not always appear as a dramatic theft, litigation or cybersecurity incident.
It is often gradual, ordinary and almost invisible.
It occurs when a scientist presents a result before the company has determined what should be protected.
It occurs when a collaboration agreement is signed without clearly distinguishing background intellectual property, project results, improvements, access rights and future exploitation rights.
It occurs when critical know-how exists only in the mind of one senior engineer.
It occurs when an employee leaves and takes years of undocumented experience with them.
It occurs when secret information is labelled “confidential” and is not managed through measures capable of supporting its legal qualification as a trade secret.
It occurs when software developers integrate external code without understanding the obligations created by its licence.
It occurs when strategic technical information is inserted into an external artificial-intelligence platform without an adequate assessment of confidentiality, retention, contractual use and infrastructure dependency.
It occurs when patents are filed because a technical invention exists, rather than because the patent supports a defined commercial position.
It occurs when a company presents investors with a list of patent applications instead of explaining how its complete intangible-assets architecture protects revenue, margins, market access and future growth.
It occurs when data, models, software, brand, know-how, contracts and human capital are managed by separate departments that never examine their interdependencies.
No single incident may destroy the company.
But together, these leaks can determine whether the company becomes a market leader, remains a specialist subcontractor, is acquired too early—or watches another organisation capture most of the economic value it helped create.
Europe’s scale-up gap is also a governance gap
Much has been written about Europe’s scale-up gap. European companies often struggle to access the amount of growth capital available to their American competitors.
The European market remains fragmented. Public procurement can be difficult to access. Regulatory complexity can slow deployment. Talented companies may relocate, sell early or become dependent on non-European infrastructure and capital.
These issues are real and must be addressed.
But more capital alone will not solve every problem. Capital accelerates what already exists.
If the company’s ownership is unclear, capital will not clarify it.
If knowledge is undocumented, capital will not automatically preserve it.
If the patent portfolio is disconnected from the product roadmap, capital may simply finance more disconnected patents.
If the collaboration strategy gives away control over future improvements, capital may accelerate the creation of value for someone else.
If key know-how depends on one person, additional funding may increase the valuation without reducing the underlying fragility.
If the business lacks freedom to operate, financing growth can magnify the eventual risk.
The European scale-up challenge is therefore not merely a funding challenge.
It is also an intangible-assets governance challenge.
Before a company can scale its revenues, it must understand what it is scaling.
Before it can defend its market, it must understand which assets create that defence.
Before it can negotiate with an industrial partner, it must know what may be shared, what must remain controlled and what should never leave the organisation.
Before it can claim sovereignty, it must know where its critical knowledge resides and who can access it.
The fragmentation problem
In a typical DeepTech company, responsibility for intangible value is distributed across multiple actors.
The CTO manages the technology.
Scientists and engineers create inventions and know-how.
The patent firm drafts and prosecutes patent applications.
The legal team negotiates contracts.
The CFO manages financing and valuation.
The CISO protects information systems.
Human resources manages employment relationships.
Business-development teams negotiate collaborations.
Marketing manages the brand.
Data teams manage datasets and models.
Each function may perform its work extremely well.
But one question remains:
Who governs the relationships between all these assets and decisions?
Who decides whether an innovation should be patented, kept secret, published, standardised, licensed, opened or abandoned?
Who ensures that the patent strategy follows the commercial roadmap rather than merely the history of the research department?
Who coordinates patent counsel, corporate lawyers, cybersecurity experts, technical teams and management?
Who ensures that the company’s trade secrets satisfy both business requirements and legal qualification requirements?
Who maps dependencies between employees, software, data, suppliers, partners and protected technology?
Who translates all these elements into a coherent narrative for investors?
Who measures whether the company is becoming more strategically defensible over time?
Frequently, the honest answer is: No one.
Everyone manages a piece of the puzzle. No one is accountable for the complete picture.
This is precisely where value leaks between organisational silos.
The missing executive function
Companies have long understood that financial resources require executive governance.
A company does not merely hire an accounting firm and assume that its entire financial strategy is therefore covered.
The accounting firm performs essential specialised work.
But the CFO remains responsible for financial planning, capital allocation, risk, reporting, performance and coordination.
The same logic must now be applied to intangible assets.
A patent firm is not the company’s internal intangible-assets executive.
A law firm is not the company’s intangible-assets executive.
A CTO should not be expected to manage, alone, the legal, financial, competitive and organisational dimensions of every intangible asset.
What is missing is an executive function capable of connecting all these actors around a single strategic objective:
Transforming knowledge, innovation and relationships into controlled and measurable business value.
This is the purpose of the Chief Intangible Assets Officer, or CIAO.
The CIAO does not replace the CTO. The CIAO does not replace the CFO. The CIAO does not replace patent attorneys, lawyers, cybersecurity specialists or technology-transfer professionals.
The CIAO orchestrates them.
The function sits at the intersection of:
- technology;
- intellectual property;
- business strategy;
- finance;
- risk;
- human capital;
- data;
- partnerships;
- and corporate governance.
For startups and scale-ups that do not yet require a full-time executive, this responsibility can be provided through a Fractional CIAO model.
The objective is not to produce another report that remains in a digital folder.
The objective is to implement the strategy:
- establish governance;
- allocate responsibilities;
- support decisions;
- coordinate advisers;
- monitor risks;
- control costs;
- create protocols;
- train teams;
- measure progress;
- and ensure continuous alignment with the company’s technological and commercial roadmap.
What value-capture architecture looks like
A serious intangible-assets strategy begins long before a patent application is drafted.
It begins by identifying what actually creates value.
For a quantum company, that may include hardware architecture, control systems, calibration methods, error-mitigation techniques, manufacturing processes, simulation tools, software, experimental data, specialised expertise and industrial partnerships.
For an artificial-intelligence company, it may include training data, model architecture, fine-tuning methods, prompts, evaluation frameworks, inference infrastructure, software, workflows, user feedback, integrations and organisational memory.
For a biotech company, it may include biological materials, experimental methods, compound data, manufacturing know-how, regulatory knowledge, clinical relationships and platform technologies.
For a space company, it may include materials, designs, manufacturing methods, mission data, software, simulation tools, supplier relationships and operational experience.
The company must then determine:
- What should be owned?
- What must be controlled?
- What should be protected through exclusive rights?
- What should remain confidential?
- What can be disclosed?
- What should be shared to accelerate adoption?
- What could become a standard?
- What creates revenue today?
- What will create negotiating power tomorrow?
This is not a static portfolio exercise. It is a dynamic architecture.
As the company changes, the architecture must change.
As the product matures, the protection strategy must evolve.
As partnerships multiply, contractual governance must become more sophisticated.
As employees join and leave, knowledge must be documented and transferred.
As artificial intelligence enters research and development, the organisation must reassess where confidential knowledge is processed.
As new markets open, territorial priorities must be reconsidered.
And as funding rounds approach, the intangible-assets narrative must be translated into investor-relevant evidence.
Investors should look beyond patent counts
Investors are increasingly aware that intangible assets drive a substantial part of corporate value.
Yet intangible-assets due diligence is still too often reduced to a checklist:
- Does the company own patents?
- Have the founders assigned their rights?
- Are the trademarks registered?
- Are employment agreements in place?
These questions are necessary. But they are not sufficient.
A strategically oriented investor should also ask:
- Do the protected assets correspond to the company’s actual and future sources of revenue?
- How easily can competitors design around the patent portfolio?
- Which essential elements remain outside the patents?
- Are critical trade secrets identified and subject to effective protection measures?
- Is the company dependent on knowledge held by a small number of individuals?
- Does it possess the necessary freedom to operate?
- Are software, data and artificial-intelligence dependencies understood?
- Could a partner, supplier or former employee challenge ownership?
- Does the collaboration structure preserve the company’s future strategic options?
- Is the portfolio designed to support licensing, market exclusion, fundraising, acquisition or all of these?
- Is management able to explain how its intangible assets create measurable competitive advantage?
The most important question is not whether the company possesses intangible assets.
Every innovative company does.
The question is whether those assets have been identified, organised and governed as a system.
From European scientific excellence to European strategic power
France Quantum and VivaTech showed me once again that Europe’s scientific and entrepreneurial foundations are exceptionally strong.
We possess talent. We possess ideas.
We possess research centres. We possess specialised industries.
We possess ambitious founders. We possess technologies capable of influencing the future of computing, energy, mobility, defence, health, communications and space exploration.
But scientific excellence does not automatically produce strategic power.
Scientific excellence creates possibility. Industrial capacity creates scale. Capital creates acceleration. Intangible-assets governance creates control.
And only when these elements operate together can innovation become durable economic and geopolitical power.
Europe must therefore move beyond a narrow question:
How can we create more innovation?
And ask a more demanding one:
How can we retain, defend, scale and monetise a greater share of the value produced by European innovation?
That question must be addressed by policymakers.
It must be addressed by universities and technology-transfer organisations.
It must be addressed by accelerators, investors and family offices.
And above all, it must be addressed inside every innovative company.
The next European champion
The next European DeepTech champion will not necessarily be the company with the largest number of patents.
It will not necessarily be the company that publishes the most research.
It will not necessarily be the company that raises the largest first round.
It will be the company that understands how all its invisible sources of value reinforce one another.
The company that knows what to patent—and what not to patent.
The company that treats trade secrets as legally qualified and operationally managed assets.
The company that controls its data, software and critical know-how.
The company that structures collaborations without surrendering its future.
The company that reduces its dependence on individual employees, providers and platforms.
The company that aligns protection expenditure with commercial priorities.
The company that can clearly demonstrate to investors why its position is difficult to reproduce.
The company that does not merely create innovation—but constructs control around it.
Europe already knows how to invent. Now it must become equally skilled at capturing the value of what it invents.
Because in the knowledge economy, the winner is not always the person who creates the idea first.
It is the organisation that understands the idea, controls its strategic environment and converts it into lasting power.
Innovation creates value. Strategy determines who keeps it.
