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At this stage of this exercise you have a basic roadmap of which “bucket” areas are of value to your particular business and where you have been and currently are spending your IP dollars. Now, spend a few minutes asking yourself what it means that you have the number of patents and applications you have in each column. Does it seem like you have too many patents and applications in the “Low Priority” or “Medium Priority” columns at the expense of patents and applications in the “High Priority” columns? Do you have too few patents or patent applications overall, especially in the “High Priority” column? (If you are not sure what the “right” number of patents and patent activity (i.e., pending patent applications and application preparation is, I suggest we do a “benchmark” exercise where we compare your business and its level to patent activity to other businesses in your industry as well as a “landscape” exercise to determine the opportunities for your business to proactively develop IP as part of your overall business strategy.) If you don’t do anything more in developing an IP Strategy than this first exercise, you now have a pretty good idea of where you have been spending your IP efforts, where to emphasize IP development (“High Priority” buckets) and also where to minimize your IP efforts (“Low Priority” buckets). By “minimize your IP efforts” I mean make the conscious decision to seriously consider not spending IP development dollars on projects falling in the “Low Priority” column. Consider working on “Medium Priority” projects if you have sufficient dollars in your budget. Better yet, take these “Medium Priority” projects and apply my “Invention Broadening” techniques to turn them into inventions that will be of demonstrable value to your business. This first exercise is a good start but it has some shortcomings. For example, what do you do if you have an exceptional, ground-breaking or paradigm shifting invention in the “Low Priority” column? Might that exceptional “Low Priority” invention be more valuable to your business than if you had a really bad invention in the “High Priority” column? To help you answer that question for your business I suggest developing a “Patent Value Chart”? A Patent Value Chart tells you specifically which “buckets” to emphasize and what types of patents (e.g., method patents, technology patents, competitor blocking patents, etc.) to get in each bucket.
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Copyright © 2005
Sirius Strategic
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