...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Innovation management can embody workflow rules, such as a document approval chain. Many organizations recognize that good practice requires one or more sign-offs before an innovation document may be utilized or released for any purpose. Decisions should be made to patent, publish, release, or hold secret innovation using a well-defined process. An example process might be a review chain where:

1. An engineer submits a document to …
2. A manager, who then may approve or reject it (possibly after seeking third party opinion) for review by …
3. An innovation committee, who then approves or reject it for handling by …
4. The CPC's office, who then approves or rejects it for publication or holding as …
5. A journal article, conference paper, public presentation, patent application, defensive publication, or internal trade secret …

An innovation management system needs to embody the flexibility to express a variety of workflow rules and actions that are appropriate to the procedures, standards, and culture of individual companies. Such workflow rules can incorporate facilities like email notifications of events, automated reminders, process status and aging reports, and rapidly accessible views to encourage use and compliance.

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

R&D Executives

One of many challenges facing R&D managers is monitoring the day-to-day innovation activity of their employees. This challenge is exacerbated when their employees are spread out across states or countries. These managers typically do not have the advantage enjoyed by sales managers who can virtually walk in the footsteps of their reps simply by reviewing weekly sales activity reports. At a glance, a sales manager can determine number of calls, sales meetings, contracts sent out, contracts closed, and all the important detail associated with each of those activities. Typically, R&D managers cannot.

With innovation reporting, R&D managers can essentially walk in the footsteps of their employees and have significantly more knowledge about their innovation activities.

Chief Patent Counsel (CPC)

An important function of CPC is to provide guidance to the business units as to patenting and other IP matters. Under ideal conditions, CPC or in-house patent counsel will perform invention “scans.” This typically involves face-to-face meetings with engineers to discuss innovation activity. From these meetings, the CPC can proactively assist the business units in IP decision making. The challenge most CPCs face is that they are so busy responding to the needs of many business leaders or business units, they do not have time to be “proactive” and are often reduced to a more reactive role. It’s all about time, and there is only so much of it each day. A CPC must be highly efficient to get far enough ahead of innovation to add strategic value.

Innovation reports are an outstanding tool for CPCs. With these reports, a CPC can actually conduct invention “scans” from their desk. With a few clicks, they can review the innovation activity of each engineer of interest. They can literally click through from the inventor to actual uploaded invention records or from relevant categories of documents to the necessary inventors. Without leaving their desks, they can glean more information about inventors than they could being face-to-face. Innovation reports can bring CPC closer to the inventors and move them from a reactive/tactical role to a proactive/strategic role.

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

In reality, meeting face-to-face or by phone is an inefficient way to collaborate. It is too difficult to connect. An innovation management system should create a collaborative environment in the same way that the Web does … with blogs. Ideally, a good innovation management system should automatically turn innovation records into internal “executive blogs.” It should also allow for concept clustering and user alerts so that relevant ideas can be pushed out to interested colleagues throughout the world. This enables managers to set alerts not only by bibliographic fields such as author and title, but also by concepts. With such capabilities, employees can “collaborate” on their own time. Invention records can be enhanced with comments from employees throughout the company, regardless of where they work or whom they know. Suddenly, many barriers to meaningful communication can be eliminated.

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

Meaningful access means being able to search the full text of all innovation records from your desktop anywhere in the world by multiple means, including by keyword, concept, date ranges, author, and division or group.

What are some practical applications that are possible once meaningful access to innovation records is in place?

Trade Secret Management

Trade secrets are both a powerful and overlooked form of intellectual property. If you can prove that you properly protect your innovation as a trade secret, you can significantly mitigate losses that go hand-in-hand with employees walking out the door with sensitive technology secrets. Nevertheless, calling something a trade secret and actually having a trade secret are very different things. Companies and employees throughout the US often misuse the term trade secret, calling any and all technology developed internally a trade secret, even though the company implements no defined processes for protection of those so-called secrets. While this paper is not intended to describe the various laws associated with trade secret protection, one common requirement of a trade secret is that companies take adequate measures to guard the secrecy of the information.

With that in mind, it is essential to have an innovation management system that limits access to specific documents or types of documents. As well, it is important to have a system that automatically monitors search and download activity. By restricting access to trade secrets, a business can prove that they appropriately integrated their trade secret policy with a process or system. By monitoring activity, a business can prove that they properly enforced their trade secret policy and access was actually restricted.

A trade secret management system should also provide a means for automatic alerts when unauthorized or suspicious activity occurs, such as large download volumes, downloads at odd times, downloads from odd IP addresses, and odd searches of the database. Such a facility can actually prevent a theft before it occurs.

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

The downside of capturing and storing invention records electronically, though, is that electronic documents can be altered, easily and undetectably. People can change dates or undetectably add content long after the creation of a document. Fraud can be committed and it could change the outcome of costly litigation. Sometimes the creation date of one or a few documents could mean the difference between a negative verdict in the millions of dollars, and a dismissal. In every case, electronic records will be needed to support both sides of a litigation matter. Opposing counsel know how easily electronic documents can be altered and will use that fact to diminish the credibility of witnesses and documents. Judges and juries also know how easily electronic records can be fraudulently altered and they often embrace conspiratorial theories. The ease with which someone can fraudulently alter electronic documents can seriously undermine the credibility of essential records that an organization may depend upon during trial.

With this in mind, it is of critical importance that an innovation management system legally safeguards all electronic records that might be needed downstream during trial or any other type of adversarial proceeding. The problem is that no one has yet invented a crystal ball that really works. Consequently, it is still impossible for any company to predict which of millions and millions of electronic records will be needed in the future during litigation against any one of any number of litigious competitors, customers, vendors, or complete strangers throughout the world.

Therefore, an innovation management system must legally safeguard all electronic records throughout the organization. It must essentially create a “document insurance” policy. Since we already know that a requirement for behavioral change will collapse an otherwise perfectly good system, the legal safeguarding must occur automatically. Third-party digital notarization by an industry-trusted source of all invention records is critical to effective innovation management. During trial or other adversarial proceedings, there are few things more powerful than testimony by objective, third-party witnesses.

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

The biggest obstacle to implementing a new system that secures all innovation records is a requirement for behavioral change on the part of innovators in the uploading process. It is difficult to gain adoption of a system that alters an innovator’s approach to his or her daily routine. In general, people do not like to change the way they do things. If a new system requires them to add or change steps in any meaningful way, that system will probably fail to be adopted and used. A failed innovation management system leads to failed innovation management.

The closer a document upload process fits within the usual work patterns of employees, the greater the chance of gaining adoption throughout an organization. The problem is that employees do things differently from one another. A document upload system that works well with one employee will not necessarily work well with another. This fact of life requires that an effective document capture component include multiple, easy methods for capturing invention records from inventors.

What does that mean? Well, it means that the upload process must allow for several types of manual upload mechanisms, automated upload mechanisms, and batch upload options. In addition, rather than requiring specific formats for documents (which, again, leads to the requirement for behavioral change), the upload and document processing components of the system must allow for the automated or manual upload of virtually any electronic formats.

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

Every day businesses hemorrhage innovative ideas that could lead to useful patents, defensive publications, and trade secrets because the innovative ideas never reach the decision body. Every day even more businesses waste resources duplicating innovative initiatives because of failures in intra-company collaboration and failures in accessible aggregation and storage of innovative ideas. Moreover, every day businesses take needless (and often costly) infringement risks because of absent mechanisms for the legal safeguarding of innovation records and processes for prior art searching. Simply put, without a strong innovation management infrastructure, IP management systems and processes are often little more than a superficial glimpse of what they could and should be.

At the same time, successful innovation management results in better innovation work product, improved allocation of resources, higher product/service margins, increased licensing revenue, stability in litigation, market dominance, and higher client and shareholder value.

So, is it enough to merely develop powerful innovation? No. It’s necessary, but not enough. Without an effective innovation management infrastructure, not only will valuable innovation and opportunities be lost, but the time and resources invested to develop that innovation and position for opportunities will be lost as well.

An effective innovation management system typically requires the following components:

• Easy capture and storage of innovation records
• Automatic third-party legal authentication of innovation records
• Secure accessibility of innovation records
• Web based innovation collaboration
• Automated innovation reports for executives and managers (daily, weekly, monthly,
• quarterly, annually)
• Document workflow for important document types
• Interaction with other document systems
• Integrated and easy-to-use prior art searching
• Integrated and easy-to-use defensive publishing

Simply put, to survive in this evolving intellectual business community, companies must become savvy in all matters of IP. Greater emphasis is being placed on effectively managing the flow of innovation throughout an entire organization. Since invention records are often scattered in various locations (laptops, PCs, paper, etc), they are not easily accessible. Moreover, the records are extremely vulnerable to vanish through a disgruntled employee, theft, or even a simple computer crash. Trade secrets are walking out the front door of corporations every day. As the amount of information increases, so too does the urgency for more efficient processes. Companies can have an abundance of data, but without effective management tools, they are unable to convert that data into useful information - reports.

As documents are automatically collected and archived into a central database, they must be legally safeguarded. This authenticates the date, time, and content of each document for future use at trial or other adversarial proceedings. Since it is impossible to know which documents may potentially be needed as evidence in IP litigation, all records should be safeguarded.

Furthermore, having a secure, web-based innovation system allows remote access for those who need it – anytime. Imagine the possibilities of searching and collaborating on all innovative documents, extracting detailed reports, and even defensively publishing documents with the click of a button.

Building a robust IP portfolio requires insight and collaboration. Often times committees and personnel from remote locations are involved in the decision making process. If not structured properly, this could considerably lengthen the innovation cycle – costing valuable time and money. In an industry where dates are everything, any slight delay in the development process can have devastating affects. An effective IMS creates a thriving innovative environment which will help a company to protect their freedom to practice.

Intellectual property management is of critical importance to all businesses hoping to compete efficiently in the global economy. The most stunning IP failures occur before an idea even enters the intellectual property management arena. Every day, businesses hemorrhage innovative ideas that could lead to useful patents, defensive publications, trademarks copyrights simply because the innovative ideas never reach the decision body. In many cases, valuable trade secrets are inadvertently revealed destroying their value as intellectual property.

InnovationQ 3.0 introduces a process workflow engine which, when combined with the secure document repository and client agent, provides a comprehensive intellectual property management solution. By automating human processes and providing a secure, easy-to-use environment, InnovationQ enables organizations to become more efficient in protecting their intellectual property. This, in turn, enables them to make better decisions regarding their innovation.

"IP.com is the global leader in enabling companies to effectively manage their intellectual property," says Steven Lai, Managing Director of the Asia Pacific Intellectual Property Association in Taiwan, Republic of China. "IP.com's InnovationQ 3.0 continues their commitment to legally safeguard intellectual property, improve decision-making, and allow companies to get the most value form their portfolios."

“InnovationQ 3.0 takes intellectual property asset management to a new level,” says Tom Petrocelli, IP.com’s Senior Vice President, Enterprise Software. “Without a strong innovation management infrastructure, intellectual property management and processes are often little more than a shadow of what they could and should be.  InnovationQ provides the tools that help facilitate better innovation work product, improved allocation of resources, and higher product and service margins. InnovationQ leads to increased licensing revenue and market dominance, stability in litigation, and higher shareholder and client value.”

In addition to the Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, InnovationQ is also available as an onsite, enterprise solution.  IP.com is committed to working with customers to develop a successful innovation management program.