Your research should lead to answers to the following questions.
1. What were some of the challenges that RIM faced to protect its intellectual property, and how did RIM handle those challenges?
2. What were some of the industry factors that influenced RIM?
3. Apply as many TCOs as you can to the RIM.

Usually, when I hear the phrase “product development”, I think of a process that involves the creation, development, modification of an existing product, its presentation; or the formulation of an entirely new product with new or different characteristics that offer new or additional benefits to satisfy the market or a specific customer. The globalized business world regards product development as the process of designing, creating and marketing new products or services to benefit customers. Sometimes referred to as new product development, the discipline is focused on developing systematic methods for guiding all the processes involved in getting a new product to market. However, according to Melissa A. Schilling, product development is the

RIM’s success in the industry of wireless technology, more specifically, the e-mail wireless communications, made the organization’s intellectual property a prime target for adversaries that were not involved in the technological innovation industry, but for patent holding firms that were sitting in the background waiting patiently for a big fish to fall prey of their treachery. The success of these patent holding firms in the patent infringement litigation arena opened the gates for RIM’s industry competitors to scavenge from the patent holding company prey.

Some of the challenges RIM faced to protect their intellectual property ignited a myriad of legal battles that wounded the Blackberry giant fatally from which RIM never recovered totally to this date. Below are summaries of litigation battles that originated after RIM, amongst other companies, decided to ignore a licensee contract agreement proposed by a Virginia based holding company in the year 2000. The US intellectual property holding company that sent the memorandum notice to RIM as well as to other technology companies and initiated the downfall of RIM was New Technology Products (NTP).

Research In Motion (RIM) was founded by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in 1984. Later on Jim Balsillie joined the company as co-CEO. RIM is a telecommunication and wireless equipment company, and headquarter is based in Waterloo, Canada. RIM is best known as the developer of the smartphones for business and government usage. (Wikipedia, 2013) In 2000, RIM encountered a huge challenge from New Technology Products (NTP), a holding patent company. NTP notified RIM of their patents that RIM wireless email service infringed upon and offered a license. However, RIM argued that there is no infringement since its replay stations were in Canada. (Teska, 2006). NTP filed a law suit and the case had lasted for six years. The case had a big impact to US government so that the US Supreme Court had to involve. A threat of shutdown BlackBerry provoked big concerns from not only US businesses but also Department of Defense. To save the big market, RIM finally reluctantly agreed to pay a settlement of $612.5 million to NTP. Surprisingly, the settlement brought a jump in RIM share nearly 15 percent. (Regan, 2006) Protecting intellectual property is one of the major security concerns of a company.
There are many ways to implement the policy like blocking video camera of employee’s phones and ask them to register their phones. To be able to protect its intellectual property, RIM records all employee conversations using its domain. According to Robin Beinfait, former Chief Information Officer, RIM employees allow using the company beta devices as testers and users. However, all communication within RIM network are logged and kept track. In case of breaching and leaking information, the company will wipe out immediately all information the device