A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the authority to exclude others from making and using an invention for a limited period of years in exchange for publishing an enabling exposure of the invention. Patent rights fall under private law, and the patent holder has the accountability to sue somebody infringing the patent to impose his right. This happens in most of the countries.
Innovators use design thinking process to initiate patent drafting process. Patent engineers working on technical aspects of patent drafting review the invention disclosure documents and prototypes to prepare a first draft of a patent application for the review of the client. Patent attorney also conducts patentability search to determine patent eligibility of the new inventions.
The commission of a prohibited act, which is concerned with the patent invention without permission from the patent holder, is known as patent infringement. Patents are an important form of competitive advantage in some of the industries whereas in others they are irrelevant. Patent thinking is a new design methodology that combines design thinking and patent design. By using this new ideation methodology teams, academia, startups, and businesses can develop new ideas, products, and processes, by prototyping a lean patent application.
Role of Design Thinking
Design Thinking is an increasingly important methodology for organizations seeking to build a more sustainable competitive advantage and implement requisite change to create a competitive advantage that helps create value. Design Thinking is also commonly called “innovation development,” “creative innovation” or “innovation strategy.” It is an iterative method by which seek to explore the consumer, challenge existing assumptions, and redefine issues at an early stage in an effort to identify feasible solutions and alternatives that may not be immediately clear at initial glance. Design Thinking starts from clearly identifying the desired end state – from product design to market realization – and works backwards, looking for ways to realize that end state via adoption of new practices and technology.
The key aspects of Design Thinking are identified by Christopher Freville as seven key stages of a design thinking effort, each one associated with a distinct design thinking process. These are Synthesis, Analysis, Design Development, Prototyping, Marketing, and Certification. These are all associated with the different stages of innovation development, each one building on the prior one, thus providing insight into how organizations use Design Thinking to innovate, thereby resulting in development of a profitable patent portfolio.
The personal goal of an employee working at a company is getting a patent, but patentable ideas do not necessarily come from merely wanting a patent. Instead, such ideas come from the accessibility of a design challenge itself. An individual needs an idea to be both novel and relevant to the enterprise if a company has an internal patent review and submission approval group. Patent reviewers can link invention value to business value by aligning individuals’ patents with the current endeavors of his organization.
There is an ongoing initiative to better understand and design for the lives of an increasingly aging population at IBM Research. Other initiatives involve the need for more efficient and secure credential management and improved accessibility in product design. These are wide areas that allow designers to think wide while trying their creative output to the needs and interests of the company. Lives of the user improved through increased security, quality of life for the elderly, and aid for those with disabilities that provide social and business value. These types of areas are ripe for innovation. The company involves itself deeply in a field in the lens of their users for getting creative mind work.
Most companies are involved in the monetization and valuation of high-tech utility patents. These differ from the other two types of patents, which are plant and design patents. In brief, a design patent protects the design or improved appearance or shape of an invention e.g. Apple’s design patents. It enhances the existing product’s style and not its function and lasts fourteen years from the date of the grant. A plant patent relates to a new variety of plants discovered by its inventor.
It lasts twenty years from the date of filing and if asserted, may prevent others from selling or using the plant. This leads us to utility patents, which last twenty years from the date of filing and give their inventor, who has discovered a new or useful process, software or the machine or a functional movement to an existing invention.
Licensing of patents is a method of monetization. But this requires careful structuring to avoid any damage to the value or loss of IP rights. Our patent licensing and monetization services are structured and customized to help patent owners and counsel identify the strongest aspects of a company’s patents.
Design Thinking innovation at Apple, a Harvard business case, won the 2013 ECCH case award. The authors of the business case are Harvard Business School professors Steven Pompey and independent researcher Barbara Feinberg. The summary and presentation created by Li Wei technology commercialization manager from the agency for science technology and research Singapore and the full business case are available from the Harvard Business Review.
In 2012 Apple became the most valuable public related company in history with a $600 share price, 620 billion USD market capital, and 100 billion USD annual sales. Apple’s success was not just the result of strategic moves or an innate sense of market timing. It is a surprising consistency in the way the company worked simply put the Apple way, first design thinking those of us on the original Macintosh team is really about what we are doing. The result was that someone saw a Mac. They fell in love with him. There was an emotional connection that some people think came from the heart and soul of the design team, Bill Atkinson, a member of the Apple Macintosh development team.
In the 1970s, computers were typically housed in discrete locations and only utilized by specialists. The notion of the tool of computer as a tool for individual work was unimaginable in the 1970s. To help people love their equipment and the experience of using it the level of complexity needed to be reduced to a large extent. Apple’s product starts with design from people’s needs and wants.
The design of the product is not limited to technology. The engineers pushed to use the same kind of creativity and innovation to make it happen. Design well thought through, and it is beyond fashion. The capacity and technology to build it are commoditized and no compromise for the functionalities. This is design thinking. A combination of user desirability technology possibility and market viability smallest details scrutinized not just the appearance of the product, but also, it’s function, features, and packaging. The design team kept on going deep until they found the key underlying principle of a problem and built on it. Design is just what it looks like and feels. Design is how it works. That simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Second is strategy and execution. Anyone can see a lot by observing Yogi Berra’s major league baseball player and manager. Apple’s history began in 1976. In 1978, it launched the first personal computer apple 2. In 1981 IBM entered the market with a PC that cloned. Since 1985 Apple’s market share kept declining. The board of Apple axed Steve Jobs. In the following eleven years, products and projects at Apple proliferated, and the consequences of various strategies and many of them failed. The technology development process became a more traditional approach found in other companies.
After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, everything changed. That particular time decision made to achieve excellence in execution. The licensing program stopped. That time 70% of new projects had been eliminated, the product line reduced from fifteen to only three, and Websites launched for direct sales. In that year, sophisticated marketing kept product development complete secret, and inventory reduced from months to a few days.
Apple has also adopted the platform strategy for its product. They design the initial product as a platform with an architecture that accommodated the development and the production of the derivative products. Customer’s experience integrated into Apple’s product design, and development and a lot of it empirically drives with iterative customer involvement. Apple worked intimately with manufacturers and assured their products completely attuned to customers. Apple’s product always evolves the importance of design as a motivation to continue innovation rather than a static approach that assumes a single conclusion.
The third is the CEO of Chief Innovator. The great will keep on going and find the key, underlying principle of the problem and come up with a beautifully elegant solution that works. It quoted by Steve Levy, Author of the Perfect Thing. Company founders essentially imprint their organizations with their personality characteristics, and Apple jobs are no exception.
Steve Job’s drive for perfection was Apple’s drive for beautiful elegant products and its superior operations. Steve Job’s vision held that Apple’s products were to be personal tools for individuals instead of an enterprise solution. Steve Jobs also had total hand-on involvement and decision making from strategy to product and service design to packaging.
Fourth is Bold Business Experimentation. “The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso, and Newton risked failure, and if we want the great, we’ve got to risk it too” – Steve Jobs. When everyone is moving online Apple, decided to move into retail and created every Apple store with the same painstaking focus on details. Apple developed and integrated its hardware and software and kept product a secret until it launched against conventional method of open platform, collaboration, community design, transparency
Apple is also constantly learning, adapting from the design of an array of colors to the black and white color theme, from the closed developer community to the open developer platform, from no similarity for other OS to Windows compatible. In summary, the root apple’s success was a set of principles with a deep commitment to great products and services at its core.
