Michael Waltrip

Michael Waltrip was the former head of Xerox’s Intellectual Property Strategy and Commercialisation group and simultaneously lead the Intellectual Capital Management (ICM) group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).  The ICM group was the innovation and intellectual property management function at the PARC, was a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, representing Xerox’s R&D arm.  The novel dual role approach of placing Michael within both the R&D organization, reporting to the VP of Innovation Strategy, and the IP legal department, reporting to the Chief IP Counsel, helped to more closely integrate innovation strategy with IP strategy.

At Xerox, Michael was responsible for pure intellectual property (IP) monetisation for both PARC and the rest of Xerox, while leading the creation of policies, training and strategy for IP portfolio development and commercialisation across the organizations.  Both groups were responsible for managing their respective processes and decisions around invention identification and review, in addition to portfolio maintenance, leveraging the teams’ more hands-on strategic role in portfolio development within both Xerox’s core document technology-based business as well as newer growth areas lead by PARC. Michael applied his breadth of experience in venture investments, diligence and portfolio management, as well as complex commercial transactions, to lead a diverse set of activities ranging from early-stage portfolio assessment and development to the negotiation and structuring of transactions. On the transaction side, he has led a wide variety of engagements from large scale sponsored research with corporate clients such as Samsung, Dai Nippon Printing, 3M, SolarWorld, Microsoft and Alcon to the spin-out of PARC technologies into venture-backed start-ups such as SolFocus, Powerset, Powercloud, and Metawave.  Michael led licensing for PARC and Xerox, including patent sales, and worked hand-in-hand with Xerox’s litigation team with respect to Xerox’s patent assertion-based activities.

Before joining PARC in 2005, Michael was lead counsel to the Acer Group’s venture funds in North America, where he was responsible for all legal matters for North American investments, which included activities on both the investment and partnership sides of the business. Before his work in the venture capital industry, Michael worked within the Acer Group’s legal department supporting Acer’s US and Latin America subsidiaries. Michael comes from the software industry and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Hastings College of the Law.

In addition to his duties at PARC and Xerox over the years, and now SRI, Michael continues to maintain a close ties to the venture world, advising venture funds and start-ups across a variety of topics.   He currently serves on the Board of FLX AI, and is an IP strategy mentor to several start-ups in Ontario, Canada through the province-funded Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON) organization.