Dubrovnik may be best known as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a location for the filming of Game of Thrones, but in early October it was also the venue for our annual customer event: CPA Global IGNITE! 2017.
The venue proved to be a fantastic location for me to welcome customers that were participating in three packed days of learning, sharing and shaping our collective futures.
At my opening address, I emphasised the importance of ideas generation throughout the ages. All human progress has come from inventors and innovators – those that have been prepared to challenge the status quo or have sought new ways to solve problems. CPA Global is proud to have some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world as our customers, and inventors are still the pioneers of human progress. We hope to play our part by empowering our customers to create more value from the ideas they generate.
I see CPA Global’s role as helping idea generators with three things. The first is helping our customers turn more of their research and development into tangible intellectual property – in other words, delivering a better return on the investments they are making. The second relates to better business decision making – we wish to help our customers by empowering them with the insight and information to do precisely that. Finally, our role is one of empowering customers to be more efficient and effective with the resources that they have.
Events such as CPA Global IGNITE! 2017 are important to our company because they enable us to facilitate these three goals in a unique environment of mutual collaboration with our customers. It is incredibly insightful to sit with customers and share how they are using products and services on a daily basis, understanding more about their needs and requirements, as well as how the products and services we provide fit into the wider business.
Having 100 customers working with CPA Global product experts over the course of three days created a rare opportunity for a deeper and more effective understanding of the challenges that IP professionals face and how we can help address them. Of course, there was also the chance to have some fun: just ask those who danced into the small hours at our gala dinner!
Innovation that generates IP is often a secretive task – the risks of sharing something valuable are too great to consider. But CPA Global IGNITE! 2017 demonstrated the value of collaboration and the real momentum that can be achieved by bringing people together.
