Allan Main; Brief Curriculum Vitae.

Allan is Principal of MAINly Consulting, a company he established in 2007 to provide specialist but practical support to help innovators make the most of their innovation efforts and the intellectual property they create.

Allan is well experienced to provide that business advice. In his thirty-plus year career, he has worked in most aspects of innovation management, technology strategy and intellectual property management principally in food and in the primary industry.

During his career Allan has worked through the continuum of innovation management including research planning, bench product/process development, R&D portfolio management, intellectual property capture and commercialisation, technology transfer, IP portfolio management, business development, and customer relationship management.

The greatest portion of that experience was with Fonterra (and several of its predecessors), New Zealand's largest company, biggest private investor in R&D, and the world's leading exporter of dairy products. Most recently Allan held corporate responsibility for technology intellectual property for Fonterra. In this period Allan's passion for the critical role of an organisational IP culture developed into a personal philosophy that now drives the activities of MAINly Consulting.

As a practitioner who has worked in real businesses in real markets Allan takes a commercially pragmatic and asset-based approach to intellectual property.

Allan is also co-inventor for two patents relating to novel cheese-making processes, and a regular speaker at conferences.