Telecom Lead Europe: Nokia veteran Craig Thompson will join Alcatel-Lucent to lead intellectual property assets business unit.
As a profit center, the new unit will be key in Alcatel-Lucent’s new operating model. The IP asset unit has more than 29,000 issued patents.
At Nokia, Thompson served as vice president of Legal and Intellectual Property affairs of the company’s mobile phone business, having originally joined Nokia’s IPR team in 2004.
Joining as senior vice president of Intellectual Property at Alcatel-Lucent, Thompson brings to Alcatel-Lucent extensive external legal practice experience in the field of information technology and communications-related law in the United States and Finland.
“We are thrilled to have Craig on board to lead the new business unit we have created to generate additional value from our extremely strong patent portfolio. Appointing an executive of Craig’s caliber is a strong statement of our commitment to leveraging the significant market interest in our intellectual property, and he will be instrumental in converting that interest into a meaningful revenue stream,” said Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs.
Thompson will oversee the company’s patent portfolio, which includes issued and pending patents encompassing a broad range of technologies, including fixed-line and wireless communications, semiconductors, consumer electronics, multimedia, optical, software, cloud computing, applications and network security.
