Rewards for Technical Disclosures
Every competent research and intellectual property executive understands the value of recognition for those commissioned with creating and developing intellectual property. A properly structured awards program can provide needed motivation for a research staff to create new innovation. It can also, and more importantly, focus them on creating strategic innovation that fits within specific product, market, or technological areas. It can even motivate invention aimed at solving a very refined problem, like developing a work-around for a competitive patent, or extending the application of a patented invention into a new marketplace.
Similarly, today's leading edge companies need to implement an awards program that incorporates recognition for technical disclosures that become published as prior art. There are multiple and varied reasons for publishing disclosures. An awards program should take these possibilities into consideration in determining how to structure the program. Without a program to recognize the publication of technical disclosures as prior art, researchers will only be motivated to chase patentable innovation, however expensive it may be to sustain, regardless of how it helps advance the business goals of the company.
Awards for technical disclosures can be designated in any number of ways:
- Provide awards for any published disclosure.
- Provide awards for disclosures directly related to an existing company patent.
- Provide special awards for developing picket fence disclosure strategies to protect critical or key patented technology for the company. This reduces the cost of protecting new applications of a patent while preserving the companies right to market and sell into those same markets. Since the companies core patented technology is fundamental to the products in these markets the disclosures are the most cost effective way to expand protection.
- Provide awards for disclosures that keep the companies supply chain open. For example, if you develop an idea for a supplier to build into a product they supply to your company, provide awards for the public disclosure of that technology so the supplier cannot leverage your idea against you at some future point. This enables you to change suppliers (if circumstances demand it) while ensuring you can get the product features and functions that you need.
- Put an award program in place to ensure that all marketing and product literature is published as part of a repeatable process. This information is already deemed "public," so why not ensure that it defeats any potential patents by your competitors.
- Provide awards for technical disclosures related to technical standards that your company is trying to seed into the marketplace.
As you can see, there are at least half a dozen ways to motivate your research staff to leverage the power and affordability of technical disclosures to achieve your business goals. Incorporating them into your IP awards program will help ensure that your company is gaining the maximum IP protection in the most affordable manner. If patents are the only way for researchers to gain financial rewards, then patents is all you will ever see from them, at great expense to your enterprise.
