Nice to hear the IP talked about - when you walk into a room full of heavy hitters you need to know how tight to keep the string on your marble bag...
I remember hearing a talk by Graeme Clark (Cochlear) about the fact that they wouldn't have survived without the cash to back their IP in the early days. Cochlear is mentioned in this .DOC (you can view in protected mode on Win7) but didn't make the cut to this interesting .PDF....