An R&D group files broad patents aimed at its sibling teams, with outside protection a secondary concern, so internal competitors face legal exposure if they keep developing rival solutions.
An example
At a cardiovascular device maker, a junior engineering team was building a pressure-sensing guidewire that could compete with the senior group's established catheter franchise. Two months before the junior team's design freeze, the senior group filed four broad patent applications covering sensor placements and signal methods close to the junior team's work, some for designs the senior group had never built. The intellectual property function, treating the filings as routine, required a freedom-to-operate review on every design choice the junior team made. The engineering lead spent the next quarter with patent counsel and away from the bench, and two cleaner designs were dropped as too risky. The design freeze slipped six months. The engineering lead had a dated set of lab notebooks and an internal technical talk from the previous year that described the approach, which counsel said might count as prior art.
Why it works
The filings make the rival team's continued work costlier: infringement exposure, design-around overhead, and legal review on every choice, with the standing risk that the general counsel halts the program on a complaint. They also make it worth less, since any commercial result is encumbered and may be credited to the patent holder. Its conditions are an IP function acting as a neutral compliance gate, claims broad enough to cover the rival's work that can still be granted, filings that precede the rival's own filings or publications, and a filing team others take at face value.
The thinking behind it
Ronald H. Coase In The Problem of Social Cost (1960), Ronald Coase argues that with costless bargaining the initial assignment of rights would not change the outcome, but because bargaining is costly, who holds the rights decides what actually happens. Broad patent filings assign rights inside the company before the sibling team's work is done, and every design choice then needs clearance. Cross-licensing between internal teams, ordered by senior leadership, brings that bargaining cost back down.
Oliver E. Williamson Oliver Williamson's Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (1975) describes opportunism as self-interest seeking with guile, and argues that organizations exist partly to safeguard transactions against it. A filing aimed at a sibling team uses a legitimate instrument for an internal advantage. An IP function that reviews internal filings for timing and scope is the kind of safeguard his account says organizations need.
Warning signs
Broad, speculative patent filings appear just before a sibling team's milestones. They cover work the filing team has not built and claim protection it has no evident outside need for. The sibling team suddenly faces heavy freedom-to-operate reviews. The timing and scope of the filings are unusual for the filing team's history.
How to defend yourself
Publish your work early, internally and where appropriate externally, to establish prior art: dated technical notes, internal talks, and invention disclosures alongside your own filings. Ask the intellectual property function to review the sibling filings for unusual timing and scope. Then take the pattern to senior leadership, framed as a question about the company's own interests, and ask them to treat the filings as internal sabotage and order cross-licensing. Keep track of how much of your team's time freedom-to-operate reviews consume, since that cost, measured in weeks, is the evidence you will need.
How a leader shuts it down
Charge the IP function with refereeing internal rivalry as well as checking compliance, and have it review filings that target a sibling team's work for timing and scope. Make cross-licensing between internal teams the default. Ask, after any procedurally routine filing, whose work just became more expensive.