About

Having steered his career towards fields related to creative industries with a practical and concrete approach to the role of law in his final year of law school, Felipe Merino Grau was almost destined for an in-house legal career. His particular interest in intellectual property and its connection to industry and Chilean development led Merino to demonstrate the initiative to approach Codelco, the largest copper-producing mining company in the world and the biggest company in Chile, to highlight the importance of assessing and managing the intellectual property in its R&D and technology efforts with local and international partners. ‘Since then I have worked designing the IP strategies and the technology transfer model for Codelco and in several technological projects within Codelco’s subsidiaries as an internal specialist, senior consultant and chief of projects’, he says. He impressed at Codelco early in his career, working for its subsidiary – the Institute of Innovation in Mining and Metallurgy – between 2005 and 2016, being entrusted with leading an arbitration trial regarding intellectual property and a trade secrets breach of over US$680m between 2007 and 2009. In 2012 Merino led the design and implementation of a new IP model and policy for the company and its parent which ‘allowed our team to introduce several best practices, helping to make a turn in our company from mainly engineering projects to innovation and tech transfer projects’, he explains. That same year, Merino was tasked with the challenge of structuring HR and human capital processes, as well as leading this area. He says that this ‘set me on the path of having an additional insight and better understanding of the business and its main challenges, being also able to have a practical approach to intangible assets and knowledge management’. In 2015 and 2016, Merino joined the team that designed and negotiated the takeover of one of Codelco’s technology based companies with a former Japanese joint venture partner, that permitted the consolidation and conformation of his current company CodelcoTech. ‘This process required a transition and downsizing process, including the redesign and refocus of several business processes and lay-off of several employees’, he highlights. At CodelcoTech, Merino has pushed to standardise several processes that were driven not only by a goal of process optimisation and service quality, but of risk management with a business-oriented rationale: ‘This has allowed the introduction of several best practices to our internal projects and within our main client’s business processes, including FTO assessments, technology scouting and forecasting processes and services. This, in the last couple of years have transformed our area from a staff area to a main business area, as we are required to work directly for our company’s clients in innovation projects and tech transfer processes, leading the way for our company into an open innovation model’, Merino says. More recently at the end of 2018, he a led a very successful collective bargaining with the company’s industrial union.