You decided to deal with IP later.
There were fires to fight. The board meeting came up, the engineer asked whether the new feature was protectable, and the answer was: we’ll come back to it. The decision was made, by the part of the company optimised for speed, not consequence.
Many R&D-driven companies run their IP off that part. File when scared, ignore when busy, panic when a competitor publishes. The pattern is invisible from the inside. You see it years later, when you try to out-license and the licensee spots the gap, when an investor asks why the IP doesn’t protect your differentiator, or when you try to enforce a patent and find out you can’t.
By the time the gap is visible, it’s already cost you. IP decisions compound silently. Every quarter you defer is a quarter the portfolio drifts further from your business strategy, and you don’t get a notification.
Discipline doesn’t fix this, because the fires are real. What fixes it is a small set of pre-agreed rules that align with your strategy. Written when nobody is panicking. Used when somebody is.
The portfolio you end up with is built by whichever part of the company was in charge when each call got made. If it was always the fast part, the portfolio shows it. You just don’t find out until it matters.