Summary
In this episode of the Reasonable Measures podcast, Chris Buntel speaks with Simone Frattasi, Head of Global IP at Maersk, about whether trade secrets can support sustainability goals rather than stand in the way of them. Their conversation looks at how companies can help accelerate the energy transition through more open IP strategies while still protecting valuable know how. Simone shares how Maersk has approached this through initiatives like the ESG Smart Pool and IP for Energy Transition, both designed to expand access to climate related innovation and encourage more collaboration across the IP ecosystem.
A central theme of the episode is that patents alone are not enough to move sustainability efforts forward quickly. Chris and Simone explain that patents often capture an early version of an invention, while much of the real commercial value lives in the later stage know how, process improvements, and implementation details that remain as trade secrets. Rather than choosing between full secrecy and full disclosure, they suggest that companies can share the impact and value of an innovation without giving away the technical details behind it. The broader takeaway is that trade secrets are not incompatible with sustainability. They can play an important role in making collaboration more effective, especially when companies use thoughtful agreements, controlled access, and balanced partnership models.
Takeaways
- Trade secrets and sustainability are not mutually exclusive. They can work together when companies share the value and impact of an innovation without immediately disclosing the underlying know how.
- Patent pools alone may not be enough to accelerate climate innovation. A great deal of commercially meaningful knowledge sits outside the patent in later stage know how, optimization, and scale up work.
- When deeper sharing is necessary, companies can use stronger contractual protections, data rooms, and staged disclosure rather than treating trade secret sharing as an all or nothing decision.
- Collaboration is essential for sustainability, but it requires better frameworks. Simone highlights the need for balanced ownership models and practical templates so both large companies and startups can collaborate fairly.
- Initiatives like IP for Energy Transition are working to build awareness, create tools, and eventually define models that could support broader collaboration in this area.
- The big message is that trade secrets should not be viewed as blockers to sustainability. When handled thoughtfully, they can help companies collaborate without giving up the core value of their innovation.
Transcript
Chris Buntel (00:12)
Hi and welcome to the next Reasonable Measures podcast. We have a great and interesting topic today, looking at the intersection of sustainability and trade secrets. It's actually a topic I've never thought about before, so it's something new for everyone. I'm Chris Buntel. I'm one of the co founders of Tangibly. And joining me today on the mic is Simone Frattasi from Copenhagen. Simone, it's great to have you here.
Simone Frattasi (00:41)
Thanks for having me here, Chris. Just maybe a quick introduction for myself. I'm the Head of Global IP of Maersk, located here in Copenhagen. We have a team both in Copenhagen, but also in Bangalore in India. We handle every IP matter within the company, including domains, management, online brand protection, and contracts. So anything related to IP matters within contracts as well.
Chris Buntel (00:47)
Please, go ahead.
Simone Frattasi (01:11)
And obviously also trade secrets and all patents, trademarks, utility models, designs, portfolios. Yeah, thanks for having me here today. Very interesting topic, right?
Chris Buntel (01:22)
Yeah, fantastic.
It is. I met with Simone, was it last year, at the Nordic IP conference that you organized and held in Copenhagen. I'm looking forward to going again this September. It was a great event. So congratulations. And I'm really curious about this topic because I had suggested a handful of kind of normal topics or maybe slightly interesting topics.
Simone Frattasi (01:39)
Thank you.
Chris Buntel (01:50)
You came back with this as a suggestion. And first off, I was totally surprised because it's a whole new topic. What caused you to think of this or what caused you to suggest this as an interesting topic? Because it certainly is.
Simone Frattasi (02:07)
Yeah, well, Maersk as a company has embarked on its Net Zero journey and it has quite much accelerated in the last few years. So we have moved from 2050 to 2040, so 10 years. And also from the IP perspective, the IP department has been looking into how to support the business in this journey.
So what can we do from an IP perspective? And I think it was September 2022 where we launched our first initiative, which was this ESG Smart Pool together with Siemens Energy where we pooled together around 300 patents which would be given to anybody that wanted to get access to that for a very symbolic price but basically to provide access to these technologies and hopefully to accelerate the energy transition because it was mainly technologies related to SDG 13, so climate change.
Now, additionally to that, Maersk is a founder and also leader of a new initiative that started in June 2025, which is called IP for Energy Transition. And IP for Energy Transition has three main objectives. One is to raise awareness and educate IP professionals within SDG 13, so climate change. What can we as IP professionals do?
And the second objective is to look into IP operations, but also company structures, from the climate perspective. So what can we do to mitigate or reduce carbon emissions? And then the third objective is to enable the energy transition. Since we sit on innovation every day as IP professionals, we should be able at least to suggest to patent offices and governments mechanisms for this type of technology, to accelerate the energy transition.
So that is why I thought about the topic of trade secrets within sustainability.
And I also obviously suggested whether Tangibly would be interested in participating in IP4ET. Now we started with a core of 11 companies, now we are at 46. So that has been growing quite a lot. And it's covering the whole IP ecosystem, so also tech and service providers, not just corporations and IP firms.
Chris Buntel (04:48)
Well, and I know a lot of people have done patent pools or other licensing models around collections of patents. And that can be very effective and really encourage people to innovate in that field instead of having a problem where there's so many patents that no one can do anything without landing in litigation. But trade secrets are a little bit different and I'm curious, how do you overcome the reluctance of most people to disclose anything about trade secrets? Most people feel extremely protective about trade secrets because they're secret. Part of the name themselves is it's a secret. And it's a little more challenging to maintain that secrecy if you're part of an IP pool.
Simone Frattasi (05:41)
Yeah, generally speaking, for example, when we are talking about ESG reports, where naturally you can disclose what was the impact, you don't necessarily need to disclose the how. So you can disclose the what, but not the how. And auditors can do the bridging in the sense of not needing to disclose the how.
So I would say also, if we look into patent pools, by the way, I just wanted to say one thing with respect to the energy transition. To be able to make that acceleration without the sharing of the know how, I think that the acceleration would be minimal.
Just sharing a pool of patents, which by the way is for a different purpose than freedom to operate, in this perspective is more really to try to do something good for us and for the planet. So it is not about risk anymore. It is about an opportunity to accelerate the energy transition, right?
So I think patent pools that we know are very much connected to standards. They are very much connected to risk and to freedom to operate purposes. So patent pools within climate change or sustainability in general need to be looked into from a different perspective. And especially, how do we make a real acceleration? And then the question is, how can we do that without know how sharing, right? And here we go into confidential information, trade secrets as well, right? I don't have the answer for that. Within IP4ET, we are looking into adaptation for patent pools, looking into this specific perspective.
Chris Buntel (07:42)
Well, and you've made a great statement about the what and not the how. And I've found in speaking with companies, a lot of people feel like a trade secret, you either disclose everything or nothing. And it's a very binary kind of yes or no decision, but you can often say, I have a great new process or a new way of making something or using something without really giving the details of how it works.
And oftentimes, the person you're communicating with, they don't really need to know the how, or at least not at that time point. And you can still tell them the what without giving up your entire trade secret. And that's really a great nuance that a lot of people don't appreciate.
Simone Frattasi (08:31)
Yeah, that's true. Exactly. You can surely somewhat disclose what are the effects and what is the impact, rather than needing to disclose necessarily the technical details. So it's more about the impact rather than maybe the technical solution of the technology itself.
Chris Buntel (08:57)
Yeah, and it might be later on, they actually do need that level of detail, which you can provide under stronger contractual protection or through data rooms or different mechanisms at the right time. But early on, just getting them interested and excited in the what is probably good enough. And you also mentioned just giving someone a patent or a collection of patents isn't really enough. And a lot of people think, I just need to give you the patent number and you can go off and make magic and everything will work fine.
What I've found is the patents are usually filed fairly early. And they do represent your understanding of the technology at that time, at the filing date. But all of the subsequent work, all of the improvements, optimizations, scale up to pilot plant and ultimately to production, there's a lot of great trade secrets that are developed and they're much closer to the commercial reality, the commercialization, than the patent which invariably was pretty early in the track. So the value is actually, all that subsequent stuff is where the real value is hiding.
Simone Frattasi (10:20)
Exactly. There is always the discussion about how much you want to disclose anyway in a patent application in order to enable it, but at the same time maybe keeping some of the secret ingredients not being disclosed in the patent application. So that is obviously a discussion that is always taken, at least we do that every time we decide to file a patent application rather than keeping the information secret, but nevertheless some of the elements we may decide to keep secret.
Chris Buntel (10:57)
Yeah, that's right. And that's for the stuff that you know as of the filing date or as you're getting ready to file. But to me, the even more exciting trade secrets are the ones that happen after you file. So it's very rare that you file the patent application and the project's finished. Invariably, you file the patent application and then you're still working on it for months or even years.
Simone Frattasi (11:17)
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Chris Buntel (11:24)
To get to the actual commercial product or service.
Simone Frattasi (11:29)
Sure. It depends also on the IP sophistication within the company, about the awareness of the different employees, different business units, of IP and the IP department in the company. In a very global company, if you need to create this culture for IP and naturally, especially here we are in the HQ in Copenhagen, whatever business units are more geographically connected to us, it's easier to create this awareness and they will know that they will need to contact us from the start.
In some remote places it may still happen, even though we have been trying to really spread the word out as much as possible with many IP training sessions. It may be that they come just right before signing a contract with an external party, showing a tool that has already been matured quite enough.
So of course then at that point, the level of trade secrets really depends also on the timing. I think also what is interesting is the tool that you have developed. I think it's called X Ray, if I remember correctly, which looking at an X Ray tool. I think it was very interesting also to show me a demo. We tried it as well because we saw how from a patent, you could retrieve possible trade secrets, which as an IP function sometimes you just start after a few years, you are not there from the start and then maybe something has been missing and maybe you are still able to protect that information somehow. So that was a very interesting feature.
Chris Buntel (12:44)
Yeah, the Patent X Ray tool. Yeah.
Simone Frattasi (12:57)
Which as an IP function sometimes you just start after a few years, you are not there from the start and then maybe something has been missing and maybe you are still able to protect that information somehow. So that was a very interesting feature.
Chris Buntel (13:13)
Well, and for our listeners who aren't familiar with Patent X Ray, it's a feature within the Tangibly platform that allows you to predict trade secrets starting from a patent document. And I didn't intend this to be a commercial, so it's all Simone's fault. Thanks for bringing it up. I appreciate it. And I'm curious back about this notion of circular economies and sustainability.
Given that all the companies are at different stages in their IP sophistication or their IP journey, some might be extremely well informed like Maersk, other ones might be completely uninformed. Maybe they're just starting to think about things like sustainability. How do you deal with that distribution or spread of knowledge and sophistication?
Simone Frattasi (14:09)
I mean, if we are talking about, for example, circular solutions in which you have many different parties involved, and I think you mentioned to me, packaging could be a good example, right, where you have many different parties that would be involved.
Necessarily, you have to have somewhat of a controlled access to the information, right, especially if there are trade secrets involved. And I think it's more going from exclusivity to this controlled access, right? And for example, in IP4ET, when we look into IP ownership, because to become sustainable, like the example of packaging, you need to collaborate and there may be multiple parties.
But I still have the feeling that everybody wants to keep everything for themselves. They want to have that exclusivity around their solutions, which is quite normal. But in order to become sustainable, we need to open up to disclose more. So it's all about finding the right balance in collaboration agreements in which there is a win to win situation. It doesn't really matter whether you have more or less leverage because as you say there may be companies that have more IP sophistication or maybe you are involved with startups in many cases, right? And of course you have more muscles than them. But it's all about finding the right balance and win to win situation for all companies.
And within IP4ET, we have some startups which have in fact mentioned, we are the weaker party in collaboration agreements. We have difficulties keeping our access to our information controlled because the other parties have more muscles than us in those agreements. So what to do? And in IP4ET, we are trying to create this balanced ownership model and to try to create some templates, a sort of toolkit, for every type of company.
Chris Buntel (16:12)
And is that run as a separate entity? I know some of the more computer things like music formats and video formats, they would actually have a licensing entity that would be the center. And then you'd have all the spokes in the wheel. Do you use that model or is it less formal or less structured?
Simone Frattasi (16:35)
In that initiative that was called ESG Smart Pool, naturally we had an administrator for the pool, so that was centralized there. So anybody that wanted to have a license would need to get in contact with the patent pool administrator. IP4ET is not an independent legal entity per se, not at least at the moment. We can call it a community or a network of companies that are joined for this specific purpose. So we are discussing obviously in the long term whether this should become an independent legal entity.
Chris Buntel (17:15)
And what are the pros and cons of either having a separate entity or just having it be more of a cooperation partnership model?
Simone Frattasi (17:26)
I think at least with respect to patent offices, what feedback we have got is that it would be easier for patent offices to collaborate with a legal entity rather than collaborate with a group of many companies, right? So where the collaboration, let's say the parties are unclear from that perspective. So that's one of the inputs that I've got at least from the patent office.
Chris Buntel (17:55)
How interesting. And I know that model's been used with different industries, certainly in the electronics field. Now you have these SEP collections getting a lot of attention. And even in medicine, there have been some collaborations that have actually been really good at bringing technology out to people that desperately need it.
Simone Frattasi (18:18)
Yeah, there is no standard with respect to sustainability or maybe if we focus on SDG 13 climate change, there is no specific standard at the moment, right? So that makes it obviously somewhat more difficult.
Because as you know from the telecom industry, there are the different 3GPP, Wi Fi standards, and then there are patent pools created around those, maybe on specific technologies, which would be IoT, for example, like Avanci and some of the others. So you mentioned, for example, MPEG, some other pools. Within IP4ET, in the long term, we are discussing about ISO standards, maybe going towards that direction, but of course it's a long shot, right?
And maybe the difficulty is also that when you talk about ESG or sustainability in general, there are so many different technology areas, right? So at the start we will need maybe if there are patent pools that should be created, maybe focused on some specific technologies, like cooling technologies, for example, rather than going broader because also it would be difficult to create a business model around it because at the end of the day we will need a patent pool administrator and it needs to run administrative wise. So even though it would be a symbolic fee, nevertheless there should be a business model that works around it.
Otherwise, as many sustainability solutions, right, clients want you to be sustainable as a company, right? But do they want to pay a premium for that? Most probably not. It's difficult to have a sustainable business model from that perspective.
Chris Buntel (20:00)
Yeah, sure.
Chris Buntel (20:00)
Not much, very small. Yeah, true.
Well, and you made a great point of sustainability is an incredibly broad category and you can be sustainable in so many different ways that it would be very easy, I would imagine, to get spread so thin that you wouldn't make any progress anywhere. It's probably better to focus. And how do you know your sustainability efforts are successful? What kind of metrics or guidelines do you think about in terms of are you moving in the right direction or not? And how successful are you being?
Simone Frattasi (20:58)
At least in IP4ET we have a task force that will need to create what are the metrics in order to monitor the activities and to decide whether are we being successful. First, we need to ingrain the SDGs into whatever activities IP4ET does, but also to try to monitor certain metrics and decide, okay, are we impactful or not? So at the moment we have not developed that, we are working into that in the task force.
Chris Buntel (21:33)
Great. And if people are interested and want to have some good reading materials or websites to visit, what should people do to learn more and possibly even get involved?
Simone Frattasi (21:47)
There is for example Professor Frank Tietze, which is one of our advisory board members from Oxford University. He has quite many papers about IP and sustainability, so the interaction between the two. Otherwise on IP4ET website, you have a webpage with a sort of full repository with many different articles. So you could start from that.
And B Corporation, you can see on their websites, I think there is also quite a lot of material there. So I would say maybe these three sources could be a good start.
Chris Buntel (22:32)
Sounds great. Well, this has been a really good conversation and again, something I'd never thought about before we arranged this podcast. It's always great to talk to you and I'll see you soon in Copenhagen.
Simone Frattasi (22:45)
Thank you, Chris. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks to the listeners. Thank you. Bye.
Chris Buntel (22:48)
Good. Thanks, Simone. See you next time.
