Donal is a specialist in the areas of innovation and intellectual property management and commercialisation. A former vice-president of R&D at Nokia, he has extensive experience at board level, including roles as director, NED and non-exec chairman.

As a consultant, he helps organisations to recognise and appreciate the value of their intellectual capital, assets and property, and to ensure that they then manage these intangibles in an efficient and effective manner. His clients include multi-nationals, SMEs, legal and IP firms, financial services companies and universities.

As a trainer, he has a passion for innovation and creativity and for making people aware of the nature and value of their intellectual property. And for getting the message across in an engaging way, using online bite-sized videos and quizzes as well as virtual and classroom-based sessions.

Career highlights

Rising from software engineer to Vice President of R&D and a Director of Intellectual Property at Nokia, Donal spent 21 years with the company, gaining wide and varied experience in the wireless telecoms industry, including periods in The Netherlands, the USA, Finland and Hong Kong, as well as the UK. He left Nokia in 2009 to found his own very successful IP consultancy. Since 2013 he has been recognised as being in the top 300 of the world’s IP strategists (the IAM 300).

Donal is also a Visiting Researcher at Imperial College Business School (London), where he teaches on intellectual property management. He also coaches and mentors a number of start-up companies on innovation and entrepreneurship. His first book was Inside the Patent Factory (Wiley, 2008) and his second Harvesting External Innovation (Gower, 2011). Donal has also written around 150 papers on various aspects of innovation and IP which have been published in a number of magazines, websites and blogs around the world.

Workshops and presentations

Donal is an accomplished presenter of boardroom briefings on a range of topics, including:

• Benchmarking IP management
• Boardroom IP briefings
• Building an IP strategy
• Conducting collaborative innovation
• Creating and implementing a comprehensive IP process
• Innovation – what is it and how to make it happen
• Innovation management and leadership
• Introduction to patents
• Introductions to IP (for engineers, for managers, for directors, etc)
• Introduction to IP agreements
• Introduction to licensing
• IP – creating value for a corporation or organisation
• IP valuation
• Project management
• R&D management
• The IP maturity ladder