A patent is a legal certificate that gives you the right to protect your invention for up to 20 years in specific territories. A patent is a legal document that is granted by the government giving an inventor the exclusive right to make, use, and sell an invention for a specifies the number of years. Movies, books, and works of art cannot be patented, but protection is available for such items under the law of copyright. Patents can be granted for products, devices, systems, composition, processes, methods, and uses but not for mere ideas like a time machine. With patents, you can exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing your invention. You can use patents to add value to your businesses, enhance your brand image, and negotiate to finance. Patents can also be licensed or sold.
A patent portfolio is a collection of patents owned by a single entity such as an individual or maybe a corporation. The patents may be related or unrelated. Patent applications also are regarded as included in the patent portfolio. The monetary benefits of a patent portfolio include the market monopoly for the portfolio holder and revenue from licensing the intellectual property. Non-monetary benefits include first-mover advantages and defence against rival portfolio holders constituting a patent portfolio that used to encourage investment because the patent has a fixed life span.
The patent portfolio provides value to a company by protecting products from others who might infringe and help in maintaining market share. Patent portfolios can serve as defensive tools and provide leverage in negotiations, and they can become sources of revenue through license or sale. It is important to develop a patent portfolio strategically to provide these advantages to their full potential. It is necessary to have a process to identify and select inventions to patent that can strengthen a patent portfolio.
For a strategic approach, it is necessary to have the right information to evaluate each invention disclosure. The portfolio involves strong patents that aligned with business goals, by correlating invention disclosure with business objectives and technical objectives. Therefore, it is necessary for describing the invention, investor disclosure asks inventors to provide information that helps in evaluating the invention’s relationship to the company’s products.
Investors must identify the product that will embody the invention and determine the way invention relates to the product. The inventors indicate the aspects of the invention that are likely to have high customer demand. Investors must detail the status of the product that will embody the invention and this information involve whether the product is under development or there is a timeline for completion.
Evaluate each invention disclosure from the perspective of the company should be done. This evaluation focuses on the current importance of technology to the company and it also considers whether technology might become important to the company in the future. If company officials want to know the importance of a particular technology, they should take feedback from the inventors and other company personnel who know the product.
The most important factor in the evaluation of each invention disclosure is the strength of the patent. Investors should identify known prior, and the results of any patentability searches assist in forming this evaluation. After the disclosure evaluation, the strong disclosure is important to the company’s current or future business goals that hold potential value outside the company or have the potential for enforceable patents that may warrant higher budgets for preparing and prosecuting patent applications. There must be done for developing patent portfolios strategically to assist a company for unlocking value from its intellectual property.
It is necessary to build and manage a patent portfolio for business or start-up companies. Patents are important for start-ups and for the establishment of the company. Patent’s strategy is different for each enterprise. There are different strategies for different types of enterprises. It is difficult to do an estimation of what patent can cost in its lifecycle. It’s not just writing costs but the arguing costs, the government fees, and the maintenance fees. Patents may be expensive. Businessman or start-up company should choose good counsel so that they can understand the costs and deliver value.
Most of the established companies recognize that a comprehensive intellectual property portfolio can be of substantial value. The key component of the intellectual property is patent. Patent holder excludes others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing that which claimed in the patent, for a limited period.
A patent portfolio strategy may vary from company to company, and large companies that have significant financial resources often pursue a strategy of procuring and maintaining a large number of patents. These companies often use their patent portfolio for generating large licensing revenues for the company.
Start-up worries that acquiring a patent is prohibitively expensive. The cost of patenting is high and order of magnitudes higher than the cost of acquiring other IP rights such as trademark and industrial design rights. The high level of financial investment included in patent filing may deter start-ups from developing a comprehensive IP strategy that involved patent filings as its initial development stage. Start-ups companies need to establish a distinct identity to differentiate themselves in a crowded tech industry full of established and emerging competitors.
A strategic patent portfolio aims at getting exclusive and comprehensive by preserving a wide class of services and products that cover a current invention. It can also protect all the different aspects of products and services. Patents assist companies in competing products, it can gain access to licensing and cross-licensing opportunities, and they can sell their technology at higher profit margins. Patent law says a cross-licensing agreement is an agreement according to which two or more parties grant a license to each other for the exploitation of the subject matter claim in one or more in patent choice.
To launch a strategic patent portfolio, an individual should identify his business goals. The business goals will guide his patent portfolio strategy in the long run by determining the benefits of patent protection of the company has the most reason to value. For fulfilling business needs, an individual should protect business core technology, and it should increase revenue streams through licensing. He should maximize profit margins.
The next step for launching a strategic patent portfolio for an individual is to set a budget. He should be prepared for the financial commitment so that filing patent applications can stop the draining of the limited resources.
After that, an individual compiles a list of ideas that he may want to patent, and then he should complete invention disclosure records (IDRs) for each of those ideas. IDRs is a confidential document prepared by a scientist or an engineer of a company which is then used by its patent department for determining whether patent protection is required for a described invention.
An individual should sort the IDRS according to priority. The most valuable IDRs become patent applications. He should think about the ideas that best aligned with business goals and which ideas likely to be patented.
An individual should identify any filing deadlines. If there is an upcoming product launch or a fast-approaching public presentation, for that, he should protect his IP by securing an early filing date by filing a provisional patent application.
An individual should estimate his filing cost. If an individual wants to stay within budget, he should estimate the cost of each patent application which he plans to file.
At last, an individual should create a filing calendar. He should build a filing calendar to keep track of important dates concerned with his company’s portfolio by using the budget and order of priority.
