Mike Dillon, General Counsel of Sun Microsystems, has written an interesting blog in which he describes a new approach for a major company that files hundreds of patent applications every year. He says:

...at some point, a company needs to ask how many patents it really needs. And, that's exactly what we did about three years ago. Up to that time Sun was filing well over 1,000 patent applications per year. But, in 2005, we made the decision to reduce our patent filings to the point that we had about 700 patents issued last year. And this number may decline in the future. While this is still a sizable number for most companies, it is a significant decline for Sun and occurs during a period in which we have more innovation than at any point in Sun's history.

Why the change? Part of the reason is financial. On average, it costs more than $20,000 to obtain a U.S. patent and this figure grows significantly when you file around the world. Also, this amount does not include annual annuities required to keep a patent in effect. Being selective in what you patent can result in significant savings. However, the bigger reason for the change is that our focus has shifted from quantity to quality. To this end, we have completely re-architected the manner in which we determine the innovations we will patent. As part of this process, inventions are reviewed by a panel of the chief technology officers from across our different lines of businesses with input from distinguished engineers and other experienced innovators. We apply a significant amount of scrutiny to determine whether something is truly innovative before we submit it to the PTO. For us, it doesn't make sense to patent everything. Rather, our focus is on patents that represent significant technological innovation.

Makes a lot of sense. Companies that file applications for several hundred patents every year have to consider carefully which of many thousands of inventions by their employees are worth making a patent application for, and which innovations should be protected with a different strategy. Managing the intellectual property review process, especially in large companies with experienced innovators in many locations around the world, is critically important and sometimes challenging to control.

In many cases, companies rely on ad hoc, human driven processes for safeguarding ideas and making decisions about them. Subsequently, a lot of innovative ideas lie fallow or are lost. Since human processes are error prone, a lot of mistakes get made. This represents a significant risk for companies today. That's why many of our larger clients are employing the newest technologies from IP.com to help them organize their processes for intellectual property review in a secure environment customized for their special needs.

InnovationQ helps protect intellectual property by securing and authenticating it. Powerful tracking and reporting capabilities enable managers to see every event associated with an intellectual property asset, helping to detect synergies in their organization and guard against misuse.

The InnovationQ workflow engine also allows companies to automate intellectual property processes in an easy to use, yet deliberate fashion that helps to ensure error-free compliance.

If your company manages a lot of intellectual property, you might find interesting the white paper "Best Practices for Successful Innovation Management" that is available to download free here from our website. And if you'd like to talk confidentially about your special requirements, by all means give us a call and let's see if we can help you.

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In a blog post titled Chinese Patent System: Problems and Best Practices on the California Biotech Law Blog, Kristie Prinz points to a recent article by Thomas Babel on IP Frontline, Patents in China - Is There Any Real Protection?

With increased pressure from the West and the World Trade Organization, China has instituted a number of reforms to its patent system. Much like the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”), China has a centralized intellectual property office, known as the State Intellectual Property Office ("SIPO"), which processes patent applications, grants patents, and enforces patents in China. At first blush, the patent system and SIPO seem to be modern and in tune with the concepts and protections found in Western patent systems. Unfortunately, the actual functioning of the patent system in China is far different from its official representation of performance.

The article goes on to make a comparison with the United States patent process. The author concludes, "No protection is foolproof. However, understanding the limitations and risks involved when producing products or components in China can help a company understand the costs of doing business in China and limit its exposure to the loss of patent rights."

IP.com Inc. is providing technologies to companies and organizations to help secure their inventions and innovations in China, where the company's Executive Vice President,  Asia Pacific, Johnson Kong, is now meeting with clients in Hong Kong. Here on our company blog, Johnson will be discussing the special needs of businesses and companies securing innovation in Asia.

Tom Petrocelli, Senior Vice President for Enterprise Software at IP.com Inc., is also travelling on business in Asia. While he writes on this blog about company business, he's also writing a personal blog Tom's Technology Take, where he reports in this weekend from Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Speaking of language translation, we note this recent announcement:

The State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) has launched a free online machine translation service for patent information searchers. The Chinese-to-English translation engine, launched on 25 April 2008, was developed by SIPO and the China Patent Information Center (CPIC). The service supports Chinese patent documents and utility models and allows English language searching for bibliographic data and abstracts of published Chinese patent documents. The machine-translation engine is now open to the public for testing.

In addition, SIPO's Intellectual Property Publishing House (IPPH) has launched an English version of their "China Intellectual Property Net" (CNIPR) website, which includes a new search tool, "C-Pat Search" and offers the possibility for a machine translation.

In the weeks and months ahead, our clients and friends will be able to read more about the business of IP.com Inc. in Asia, and we'll even be blogging in Chinese languages some of our executives are fluent in -- more fluent in Chinese than in blogging, perhaps, so bear with us while we get this blog up to speed for our readers in Asia.

We urge our readers around the world to give generously to the victims of the recent earthquake disaster. Here's an excellent China Earthquake Donation Guide, recommended by our friends at the China Law Blog.

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The authors of  the outstanding "Patent Docs" blog are patent attorneys who hold doctorates in biotech and chemical disciplines, so it's a good place to keep track of all the upcoming continuing education seminars and conferences of interest to patent professionals in those industries.

IP.com Inc. will be represented at two of those upcoming conferences:

May 28-30, 2008 - PharmaBiotech IP Summit (Worldwide Business Research) - Philadelphia, PA

June 17-20, 2008 - BIO International Convention (Biotechnology Industry Organization) - San Diego, CA

In addition to introducing InnovationQ to many prospective clients like these, hopefully, we'll get a chance during these conferences to meet with outstanding bloggers like  the Patent Docs and get together over coffee with the Patent Baristas. If you're going to be attending one of these upcoming conferences and would like to meet up while we're there, contact us and we'll set something up.

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We're at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo at the World Trade Center in Boston showing off the latest version of InnovationQ. This release, version 3.1, adds several major new features to the InnovationQ platform.

InnovationQ helps companies safeguard their intellectual property, derive more value from ideas, and speed the monetization of innovation. With streamlined processes and a secure system for managing innovation, InnovationQ effectively protects and enhances intellectual property from its earliest stages.

Version 3.1 incorporates collaborative features within the InnovationQ platform. With InnovationQ, users can now efficiently communicate as a team in an environment that secures their ideas as intellectual property. Combined with the workflow engine and document management capabilities, InnovationQ delivers full-featured innovation and intellectual property management solutions.

Next month, we'll be at the PharmaBiotech IP Summit in Philadelphia.

See what's happening here at IP.com in the weeks and months ahead, and where you'll be able to meet up with us between now and the Bio International Convention in San Diego in June.

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It's interesting to see the growing number of Fortune 500 companies and Global 1000 businesses with blogs by CEO and other senior level executives who are blogging for their companies.

Today, we discovered another, The Manufacturing Industry Blog by Lynette McTigue, the Global Industry Marketing Manager for Xerox Global Services. On that corporate blog, Xerox highlights current industry themes and challenges, and how manufacturing organizations use document-related concepts and technologies to reduce costs, improve client relationships and increase productivity.

What caught our attention was this link to Enterprise Security – Tightening Your Grip on Trade Secrets, a white paper by David Drab, Xerox's thought leader on security,  He makes some excellent points about managing trade secrets we'd like to share with our readers here.

In today's world, if trade secrets are not nailed down they are more likely to walk out the door and into the hands of a competitor. Plain and simple they are at high risk, and perhaps someone's job is or will be as well. This is the way it works:

A company hires an employee because of her education, knowledge and expertise. The company pays her to invent, to create new ideas that ultimately add value in profitability and corporate growth. She does her job well, then after a half dozen years or so, greener pastures are on the horizon--bigger earning potential, more prestige, career fast-tracking. She markets the idea she was paid to create in pursuit of fame and fortune. She accepts the offer she can't refuse from a competitor and before too long the idea becomes a new product launch. Her former company files a theft of trade secrets lawsuit and ownership litigation ensues.

Many variations of this scenario unfold each day in enterprises across the globe providing endless drama. They represent the tip of the iceberg in spectrum of trade secret theft and misappropriation that extends far beneath the surface into high-stakes espionage. Trade secret litigation is a public spectacle. It is very costly and time intensive, not to mention the negative impact on reputation and shareholder confidence that results. Unfortunately, many of these kinds of cases could have been avoided had there been an effective trade secret management system in place that explicitly described company policies, procedures and protocols governing the identification, handling and use of trade secret information. An organization that exhibits a languid posture towards trade secret management subtly diminishes the importance of ownership, use and control. A person with authorized access can more easily rationalize that ownership is discretionary even though signed confidentiality agreements may be in place. The corporate message simply is not clear, it is not concrete and it is not convincing. Without a management system and definitive handling protocols, trade secrets are vulnerable and at high risk.

Many of our clients use a Publication Clearance System as a component of their  companies' Trade Secret Management. The pub clearance is one important part of filtering and identifying potential trade secrets before anyone in the company inadvertently discloses a trade secret to the public. Another key component of an effective innovation protection system is a secure repository for managing and protecting access to critical trade secrets.

What does your company use to protect its valuable trade secrets? If you're not sure, or wonder if adequate systems are securing your innovations, you may want to contact us for a complimentary review of how your trade secrets are safeguarded. You might also call David Drab at Xerox, who clearly understands the problems and solutions for trade secret management. Heck, with so much at stake for your company, you should probably give us both a call to see how we can help.

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Over the years I've written dozens of technical articles, blogs, and marketing literature.  Most of what I wrote was reviewed by marketing, engineering, and perhaps sales. My articles have been examined for their ability to carry the corporate message, technical accuracy, and how the pieces positioned products. No one ever brought up the issue of intellectual property. This is not something unique to my experience. Companies worry about the content and form of publications but not the IP that might be revealed in them. When someone does catch some important IP heading out the door it is often by happenstance. It's not so much that companies don't care.

If you bring up the subject of "IP in publications" most companies will sincerely tell you that they are worried about it. Yet despite that, examining publications for IP is not always part of the normal publication review process. On the flip side are the companies that are paranoid about IP in publications. For many, the knee jerk reaction is "publish nothing!" This doesn't work for long since publications are a major part of corporate communications. Are you going to tell scientists that they can't publish a scientific paper? They won't work for you. Just try and shut up an engineer with a good idea for an article. You'll only infuriate him. Marketing has to publish white papers and sales literature so you can't stop them from producing publications. 

The simple solution is a publication clearance process, implemented as a workflow. The process of Publication Clearance pushes the document in front of everyone who should see it including legal counsel, patent counsel, technical and marketing. Publication clearance within InnovationQ also protects the document as intellectual property. It is subjected to the same LegalSafeguarding process as documents in the Trade Secret Management modules. We can even build hooks into docketing or our Trade Secret Management modules to help better identify IP contained in publications before it is too late.

Adopting a publication clearance process is a good first step toward protecting important intellectual property. Having tools to automate this process makes it much easier to live with.

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It seems like every other day we hear about another company losing important data. Just recently (Thursday, January 17, 2008), Iron Mountain announced that they lost a tape with personal information on over 650,000 people on it. Please don't think I'm picking on Iron Mountain. This type of data loss happen regularly. What we hear about in the news are the situations where financial or private information is lost. What we don't hear about is lost or misplaced intellectual property. Companies keep this quiet since it is an embarrassing internal matter that they don't have to broadcast.

Yet IP data loss happens all the time. Flash drives and flash memory provide high capacity storage at a cheap price. Portable USB hard drives of up to 500GB are now available for very little money. This is big enough to house large corporate databases and as easy to lose as a cell phone. Which brings us to personal digital devices like cell phones and music players. These have substantial amounts of storage which often contain more than just someone's tunes or pictures of their cat.

All of this mobile storage creates an enormous IP problem. Most people don't realize that practically anything can be intellectual property. The end result is that almost everyone is, at some point, walking around with large amounts of intellectual property in an easy-to-lose form. Mobile storage also makes it very easy for folks to go over to the dark side and take intellectual property. It's now all too simple to copy large amounts of information and very hard to track when it happens.

The good news is that the only one who gets hurt if you lose your intellectual property is you (and your shareholders). If someone loses 150,000 Social Security numbers then there are 150,000 people at risk outside your company. The bad news is that you lose big. A simple "flash drive accident" may hand your competitor your most trusted secrets, jeopardizing new products, revenue, and reputation.

As bad as the bad is, it can be mitigated. First, make sure that you have copies of everything that might contain intellectual property in a secure location. This way, if you have to prove prior art, you can do so. If you need to prove that the information was taken(misappropriated), rather than accidentally lost,  you can do that too. Second, continuously monitor the landscape to see if anything is leaking. Many folks only survey the intellectual property space when they are applying for a patent. While there are a dozen reasons to do this, finding where your intellectual property is turning up is one of them. Finally, review important information for intellectual property on a regular basis. Not everything is important but you won't know that until you review it. This way everyone will have a better appreciation of what needs to be locked down and can't ever be copied to mobile storage or devices.

This is where IP.com can help. Our InnovationQ, Prior Art Database, and Patent Search Services can, when taken together, help secure your intellectual property, assist in making decisions about what is or is not IP,  and provide you the business intelligence you need when surveying the IP landscape.

Otherwise you might wake up one day and find your that your IP has sprouted legs and walked off.

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"This is not a tool. This is a toy. THIS is a tool!" - Julia Childs, on rolling pins.

Email has had a major impact on business. It's all but eliminated the need to send letters and memos on paper. The ability to have quick, on-line conversations has made e-mail (and it's kin, instant messaging and texting) the model for modern communications. For teams trying to produce something creative, however, it falls short. The issue with e-mail is that it is totally free form, both in terms of information and user action. With e-mail, you can't produce predictable results. You don't know how the information will be organized or even what information you might get. While the ability to write anything has its strengths, e-mail systems usually need to be coupled with databases and other structured information systems to be useful for managing innovation. The unstructured nature of e-mail also makes tracking difficult. From an IP perspective, this means no inherent way to protect prior art.

The failure of email to support innovative processes and protect IP is part of the reason that IP.com has developed collaboration features in InnovationQ. The Consultation feature available in the InnovationQ workflow engine is a form of structured collaboration. Rather than take interactions offline to e-mail, we have introduced a method of interacting  that mimics the freeform nature of e-mail. At the same time, users can tap into the the structure of a workflow and the structured documents attached to the workflow.

This is only the first step. The next version of InnovationQ will have a new Collaborative Innovation module that provides for group interactions within a structured environment. While maintaining the free flow of ideas, InnovationQ will allow those ideas to be tracked and preserved as IP. Just as important, it will encourage users to drive toward a goal rather than flail about in e-mail.

E-mail is great. Without it, most of us couldn't function. It has its limitations though, especially in the innovation process. We need to recognize these limitations and use tools better suited to our purpose. InnovationQ is about innovation. It's the tool to use when you want to accomplish something creative and protect it at the same time.

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Booz Allen Hamilton’s annual study of the world’s largest corporate R&D spenders finds two primary success factors: aligning the innovation model to corporate strategy and listening to customers every step of the way.

This year, for the first time, we looked more directly into the connections between corporate and innovation strategy, and between innovation strategy and in-depth customer understanding. We selected a group of the Global Innovation 1000 companies, representative of the total in their mix of industries and company sizes, that spent a combined total of $68 billion on R&D in 2006. Through surveys and follow-up interviews with C-suite and senior executives of companies such as IBM, Thales, GE, Bayer, 3M, Autoliv, and Denso, among others, we ex­plored their approaches to technology, customers, and markets, and how tightly their innovation strategies were connected to their overall corporate goals and direction.

The results were revealing.

Click here to read the article by and download a copy of the report, which examines companies that each favored one of three distinct innovation strategies.

Is there a best innovation strategy? No. All three of the strategies outlined above can succeed in the marketplace. Is there a best innovation strategy for any given company? Yes. It is the approach that best suits — and is most closely aligned with — the company’s overall corporate strategy and the competitive environment in which the company operates. For instance, the success of Market Readers like Parker Hannifin and Plantronics can be firmly tied to their ability to apply their strongly value-oriented corporate strategy (as defined by clear financial goals) to their R&D decisions.

For DeWalt, technology innovation stems from close observation of its demanding, knowledgeable customers, and breakthrough innovation is more a matter of putting technology to use in new ways than making major new discoveries. Siemens, on the other hand, operates in many different industries, most of them on the cutting edge of technology. Success therefore requires a mix of incremental and breakthrough innovation, with the emphasis on creating new technologies to open up new markets.

The one R&D tactic employed by every company we spoke to was an insistence on managing the innovation process from start to finish as tightly as possible. That included, in every case, a disciplined stage-by-stage approval process combined with regular measurement of every critical factor, from time and money spent in product development to the success of new products in the market. This, combined with a strong portfolio management program, has allowed these companies to understand better how their innovation engines promote their company’s long-term growth.

In the end, the key to innovation success has nothing to do with how much money you spend. It is directly related to the effort expended to align innovation with strategy and your customers, and to manage the entire process with discipline and transparency.

Siemens, one of the companies featured in this article, is among the many participating corporations that recognize the value of publishing their own defensive disclosures in the IP.com Prior Art Database, as is Plantronics.

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Integrating with Existing Software Systems

Seldom can a single software system satisfy the needs of an entire business. Integrating best of breed solutions into existing systems is a requirement of any innovation management system. A good innovation management system processes documents in a wide variety of common formats (such as PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and accommodates documents or files in any format. Innovation management requires that the system adapt to the environment, not vice versa.

Additionally, an innovation management system should integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure, such as leading SQL databases (like MySQL, Oracle, or DB2), mail servers (such as Notes, Exchange, or sendmail), and centralized directory management (such as Active Directory or other LDAP system).

Integrated Prior Art Searching

Although thorough prior art searching should be done by search professionals, innovators and managers often require quick access to limited prior art searching. Providing this means providing access to prior art from innovators' desktops, without the need for advanced search skills.

An ideal innovation management system will provide rapid access to both internal and worldwide prior art by using a document as a search query. This would eliminate the need to have any search skills and instantly empower innovators and managers alike to see the technology and IP landscape related to their own innovation.

Integrated Defensive Publishing

The most efficient means of preventing competitors from obtaining patents is defensive publishing. Unlike patents, that require filing in all relevant countries throughout the world, one defensive publication can prevent or defeat patents worldwide. Many of the most innovative companies in the world have integrated defensive publishing capabilities directly into their innovation management systems. This reduces publishing barriers once a decision has been made to place innovation defensively into the public domain.

Since the ideal innovation management system is already capturing innovation records, and making them rapidly available for decision, an integrated defensive publishing capability can be little more than a link.

This is the eighth in a series of articles on this blog about Best Practices For Successful Innovation Management. For more in this series, see:

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