LAW ASSIGNMENT

The aim of this essay is to asses the “ttools” case study (Kellog School of Management, 2006) and decide what would be the best alternative for the Hazzards to rely on, considering these alternatives: competition, negotiation, litigation or other.
In order of being able to asses this case, it is important to understand certain terms. These are:

Patent: “a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention.”(1) A patent registration may only be approved if the invention is new, if it is an inventive step (something not obvious to a person skilled in the art) and it must be capable of …show more content…

With the purpose of deciding which choice would be the best alternative ttools could adopt, it is important to analyze each of the 3 options proposed.

Competing against Palm
If the Hazzards (ttools) chose to compete against IDEO, they would have to stop focusing on trying to negotiate with Palm but more on using its available resources to achieve competitive advantage and try to increase their market share (hence, more customers) who will opt for purchasing ttools pen/stylus devices instead of IDEO’s. We also have to take into consideration that Palm has not informed ttools about taking away the ad of the Throttle pen from InSync Online newsletter, therefore, we can still rely on having it advertised in an important channel that will reach many current and potential customers. (Kellog School of Management, 2006) Nevertheless, some important questions should be raised when considering whether if competing with Palm is a good idea or not. For instance, what differentiates us from our competitor’s product? Is the other company bigger than ours? Do they have more budget than we do? Is their market share higher than the one we currently have? Answering to these questions, price and quality are the main differences between ttools Throttle pen/stylus and IDEO’s Palm V Dual Action stylus. ttools prices are lower than IDEO’s and the quality of our products is also higher, thus, even IDEO being a significantly bigger company than ttools and