Alcatel-Lucent has appointed Craig Thompson to lead a new business unit managing one of the portfolios of intellectual property assets as a dedicated profit centre. In his new role at Alcatel-Lucent Thompson will oversee the company's patent portfolio which includes issued and pending patents encompassing a range of technologies, including fixed-line and 3G and LTE mobile communications, semiconductors, consumer electronics, multimedia, optical transmission, software, cloud computing, applications and network security. In his role as senior vice-president of intellectual property at Alcatel-Lucent, Thompson will report to Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs. Thompson will take up his new position on 03 December, joining Alcatel-Lucent from Nokia where he served as vice-president of legal and intellectual property affairs of the company's mobile phone business, having originally joined Nokia's IPR team. With more than 29,000 issued patents, and several thousand patent applications filed each year, the new unit will be key in Alcatel-Lucent's new operating model and designed to facilitate delivery of The Performance Program, the initiative to generate EUR 1.25 billion of cost savings by the end of 2013. Thompson has been a practicing lawyer for eighteen years, and brings to Alcatel-Lucent global intellectual property licensing experience and knowledge of the mobile communications and consumer electronics businesses.
