I recently read an Idealog article on improving your patent spend. It contains some useful advice (ask about the lifetime cost) and some things I can’t imagine any company having enough resource to do.
Knowing how to find attorneys in multiple countries and manage all of the information coming in from them? The only companies I know that do that on a regular basis are university commercialisation companies with skilled staff – Auckland Uniservices has two patent attorneys working as their IP managers to manage their portfolio – and they still use patent attorney firms to help them.
So, if you’ve only got one or two patents, or are just starting, what do you do?
Here, I present my four rules for improving your patent (and trade mark) spend – and to give you the best possible protection. If you spend money on it, make sure it’s worth it!
1. Do research
The biggest mistake companies usually make is to run off to a patent attorney the first time they have an idea or new product. They are not sure why, or might think a patent is a magic bullet that will stop their competitors chasing them.
Unfortunately, a patent can only protect the part of their product that is considered an invention, i.e. the part that is new and inventive (not an obvious improvement). This rush in the “idea-stage” leaves the patent attorney with two options: offer to do preliminary searching for you at a cost of thousands of dollars, or guess and hope for the best.
A better idea is for you to spend a few hours doing your own research, so you can confidently discuss with the attorney how your invention is different than previous innovations. You will also be confident that if this difference is only minor, it will still be worthwhile to protect from a business perspective. Spending years and money obtaining a patent only to find that a competitor can easily design around it can be heartbreaking.
Continue reading Four rules for effective intellectual property management