Later this week Ocean Tomo Managing Director Justin Lewis will join the IP Counsel Café Breakfast Briefing. Foley & Lardner partner Pavan Agarwal will host a discussion with Laura Gisler and Olivia Tsai. Laura is the Head of IP for Polestar, a Swedish automotive brand owned by Volvo Cars, and Olivia is Head of IP at Cruise, an American self-driving car company and subsidiary of GM.
The IP Counsel Café Breakfast Briefing conversation will explore how the companies anticipate the next four years will be different from the previous four years, focusing on current challenges and adapting innovation strategies.
According to Ocean Tomo Automotive Industry Analyst Chris Stearns, Microsoft joined GM, Honda Motor, and other investors in a combined $2 billion+ investment in Cruise this January. As part of this agreement, Microsoft will become the preferred cloud provider to GM and Cruise, working collaboratively on software and hardware engineering, cloud computing capabilities, manufacturing, and partner ecosystem development to support and scale autonomous transportation.
Tucker Goebler, Automotive Industry Analyst for Ocean Tomo, shares a related industry automotive development from January when Baidu announced plans to develop electric vehicles with Geely, Guangzhou Automobile Group Co Ltd, the parent company of Volvo and Polestar. Also announced in January, Baidu Apollo has been approved by the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test their driverless vehicles after receiving the first permit to conduct driverless tests on the public streets in the Changsha, Hunan province.
The Ocean Tomo Automotive Industry Analysts will sit down with Justin Lewis of Ocean Tomo for a debrief following the IP Counsel Café to share next week. The Automotive Industry Report will be released this summer. You can request a copy when it becomes available here.
