Tulsa World: Margaret Millikin offers some of her ideas on the value of a business' intellectual property assets in the well-titled "Leveraging of intellectual property important" with a special focus on the process of getting your IP house in order. She writes,

"Good investors assess values and reallocate to make their assets work harder. This axiom applies to your intellectual property as well. Just as you would rebalance your retirement portfolio, savvy investors review and rebalance their IP assets, or 'intellectual capital,' in a down economy." Millikin has a 3-step program for you to follow as you work at discovering any IP your venture might be overlooking including a tip to perform an full accounting of this valuable resource: "An IP audit is a useful tool to identify your IP and determine where and how it is being used. Organizations and individuals use these reviews to identify and update their inventory of intellectual assets and record them in a central location. The list should be maintained and periodically updated."

New York Post: Who's afraid of new search engine Bing? Would you be surprised to learn that Google's Sergey Brin is scrambling to reverse engineer Microsoft's latest bid for search engine domination? James Doran delivers some insider details of the Google exec's actions in light of upstart Bing's increasing market share. "[C]o-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned. Brin, according to sources inside the tech behemoth, is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing's crucial search algorithm differs from that used by the company he founded in 1998 with Stanford University classmate Larry Page." Officially, Google is offering no comment on the veracity of this rumor, but surely Bing has gotten some attention from the Mountain View, California king of search/adwords. At only an 11 percent market share, Microsoft's "decision engine" has plenty of room to grow if Google is unable to modify their proprietary search algorithm to steal traffic away from Bing. Check out Fear Grips Google for the rest of this developing story.

TechDirt.com: Old Orrin Hatch is at it again. Propagating intellectual property and copyright falsehoods and generally making a mess of the whole IP argument. One of the main weapons in Senator Hatch's tirade against IP pirates is his frequent citation of various "expert" studies, but only those that prove his point. Article author Mike Masnick explains this onerous misapplication of non-empirical data: "The study, which Senator Hatch conveniently did not cite (wonder why...?) was actually written by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a group of companies who have benefited greatly from the intellectual monopolies, and clearly wish to extract additional monopoly rents. Their study has been widely discredited and debunked, and was recently the source of controversy after the Conference Board of Canada mistakenly relied on its results -- which The Conference Board later withdrew and apologized for after realizing what a mistake it was to rely on those numbers. In the meantime, the only reason that research was used by The Conference Board was because the IIPA was upset with the actual numbers that showed copyright infringement really wasn't that big of an issue."  If this piques your interest, be sure to read the rest of Masnick's Senator Orrin Hatch... And The Lies The Copyright Industry Tells.

BusinessWeek - NEXT: Helen Waters had a chance to talk with some of the attendees at the Incentive To Innovate conference held at the United Nations building and learned that innovation, for some, is about process, not people. From How to build an innovation culture Waters writes, "There were no 'aha', breakthrough moments of clarity here. Instead, conference attendees came up with some perfectly reasonable suggestions of encouraging cross-department collaboration or creating internal networks for ideas. What came out loud and clear is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this critical issue." One attendee points out that if you have a system in place for generating innovative ideas, it can survive almost any change in personnel: "'I've fired nearly everyone, rehired and had exactly the same company,' he said. In other words, fostering innovation is about the way you do business as much as who does your business for you. Recreate the same uncreative processes and you’ll have the same uncreative business[,]" said former Halliburton CEO John W Gibson. Waters also provides a link to her podcast interview with InnoCentive’s Dwayne Spradlin for your auditory delight.

Xconomy.com - Boston: Can waste management be innovative? You betcha! Especially if you're the eponymous Waste Management, a Houston, TX-based waste hauler and environmental services company with more than 20 million commercial, residential, municipal, and industrial customers in North America. In a homerun business idea, sun-powered trash compactor startup BigBelly Solar is teaming up with Waste Management to widen the availability of its environmentally-friendly waste collection products. Wade Roush provides more dirty details of the clean sweep in the making: "The two companies aren’t revealing the financial terms of their deal. But it could be lucrative for both parties, as it gives Waste Management an attractive new service to offer to cities or large commercial facilities that already hire the company to pick up residential curbside waste or to empty dumpsters. Waste Management hasn’t traditionally collected waste from public trash bins—but in places where City Hall wants to install the BigBelly machines, residents may soon see Waste Management’s distinctive green trucks rather than public-works trucks emptying sidewalk waste containers." BigBelly's solar-powered trash compactor units "can hold up to five times more waste than ordinary public trash bins" and send out a wireless signal when full. How cool is that? For more on this potentially powerful partnership, read BigBelly Strikes Big Agreement with Waste Management.

Bonus piece o' the day: Freep.com presents Microsoft CEO Ballmer to push innovation by Tom Walsh.