"Naked ladies dancing on the tongue." This is how I responded on first tasting Art Series Chardonnay at the cellar door of Leeuwin Estate in 2004.

Hearing my uncensored appreciation, the man serving me at the cellar door, Mr D. Moore, told me a story. He told me about the wine's background.

It is arguably Australia's greatest Chardonnay. It's almost A$100 a bottle.

Speed pays. You already know that customers pay more if you can deliver fast with no reduction in quality.

Speed wins. Speed is a critical pre-requisite to be competitive in markets.

Speed in innovation pays and wins. In a commercialisation venture it is helpful to measure speed. Get a measure of the speed of change of intellectual property and the agility of the management team, business processes, methodologies and technology.

With brilliant imagination, in its opening ceremony the Sydney Olympics presented Nikki Webster in the Australian experience of going swimming. (*)

More than water skills will be needed beyond the Beijing Olympics for Australian online businesses to survive and thrive against the next internet wave.

From 1995 the web encouraged water sports. Today the internet has moved beyond surfing.

The question here is how should Australian online businesses compete in the years ahead to serve local, international or global markets.

When did social media or online social networking start? Was it a few years ago off the back of MySpace, Facebook and Web 2.0?

No. It was thriving in San Francisco and the Bay Area before Mark Zuckerberg, twenty-something CEO and founder of Facebook, was born.

What is the secret of enduring greatness for a company? Jim Collins has an answer.

Collins is a prominent writer on business management and author of business books which are among the all time best sellers. He wrote Good to Great and co-authored Built to Last. An excellent overview of Good to Great is the one here by Jim Belshaw. 

In his recent article in Fortune magazine, The secret of enduring greatness, Collins revisits his familiar theme of business survival and endurance. His data includes who's in and out of the Fortune 500 list.

And this is what he concludes is the secret of enduring greatness for a company: "Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, whether you make it onto the Fortune 500, and whether you stay there, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you."

Fashion, industrialisation and entrepreneurship are forever linked.

Something old. The word "entrepreneur" was made fashionable by someone who grew rich as a cotton factory entrepreneur. The French economic theorist, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), is credited as the first in continental Europe to write about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. He was inspired by Adam Smith.

QUESTION: What are the most effective strategies for commercialisation of a company's ideas, products, R&D and intellectual property? 

ANSWER: "It is the approach that best suits - and is most closely aligned with - the company's overall corporate strategy and the competitive environment in which the company operates."

A mantra for our business environment emphasising innovation and collaboration could be: "Collaborate to survive and invent."

Collaboration is as old as the first invention. Bill Bryson's remarkable book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, tells us in his 29th chapter about teardrop-shaped stone hand-axes.

These axes first appeared about a million and a half years ago and are certainly the most common technology for the vast majority of human history. They have come to be known as Acheulean tools.

I have a favourite question in conversations with start-ups and new clients. It is a question which leads to discussions about the client's business or commercial situation. 

It's a question designed to shed light on the client's business model, industry economics and facts relevant to providing a better legal solution.

We all know that owning, controlling and trading in intellectual property (IP) can create wealth. Losing ownership and control, or not trading IP, can lose wealth.

Industry case studies bring these truths to life. One for the music industry was in BusinessWeek last week. It reports US census data showing one in four U.S. record stores around in 2002 was gone by 2005, a net loss of 1,900 stores. It points at digital retailer, iTunes, which boasts 6 million songs.

Personal case studies make the truths register. We did it in Music Business Entrepreneurship: Eulogy for James Brown. We do it now for Brown's predecessor, and fellow Georgian, Ray Charles (1930-2004).

We welcome and make no charge for conversations with new clients about how we might help with their intellectual property. To get you into the groove to call, here are some thoughts on creativity, invention and innovation. We are tracking with Australia's 2020 Summit.

All human beings have a creative urge. Mine for some months has been to write about the following four minute home video on YouTube. It's the Fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Los Vegas. The music is Dawn, Ayeshe's Dance, a piece in the Gayane ballet by Aram Khachaturian. Observe the fountain's interplay with the music and then read on.

Speaking in workshops and seminars I've often posed a puzzle to wake up the audience. I've asked: "What is the most powerful thing in the cave of a cave man when he skins a freshly killed beast using a stone tool?"

Most guess that the most powerful thing must be the stone tool. Few point to the one thing that helps the cave man know where to hunt, what to hunt, how to skin and how to fashion tools to help in all aspects of survival.

That most powerful thing is the cave man's brain.

In disputes between clients and their consultants two questions often arise.

They are whether money is outstanding and who owns the intellectual property in completed and delivered work. The short answer for both questions is, it depends... and a lot on what is in writing.

Millions of people each day accept or click "OK" to terms of use on websites and internet facilities. The terms of use regulate legal relationships, particularly contractual dealings between users and site owners.

Terms of use are useful because most online intellectual property (IP) and general business law issues can be partially or fully treated or neutralised with comprehensive, customised and site-specific provisions. This is apparent from common law (ie court decisions in Australia and elsewhere), and our day to day practice as specialists in IP, internet law, IT and E-business law.