Securing Innovation

Turning One and Blogrolling Right Along

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:24:27 -0500

It's been about a year now since we started our blog, Securing Innovation, and were given this warm welcome by Victoria Pynchon at The IP ADR Blog. Since then, our readership has grown remarkably, and many have subscribed to this blog's feeds.

Securing Innovation also got a lot of link love when we hosted Blawg Review #179, which highlighted the best of the intellectual property blogosphere while commemorating the invention of the ballpoint pen. We're especially grateful for the generous comments from Victoria Pynchon regarding our relatively new blog.

If we have achieved such heights, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants, and we'd like to acknowledge the support of those bloggers in the intellectual property community who have kindly added a link to Securing Innovation in the blogrolls of their well-regarded blogs.

The Legal Thing, by Mike Dillon
Patent Baristas, by Stephen Albainy-Jenei
Patent Docs, Donald Zuhn, Kevin Noonan, Chris Singer, and Sherri Oslick
The Invent Blog, by Stephen Nipper
Green Patent Blog, by Eric Lane
Infamy or Praise, by Colin Samuels
May It Please the Court, by J. Craig Williams
Likelihood of Confusion, by Ron Coleman
Anticipate This!, by Jake Ward and Mike Dockins
IP ThinkTank, by Duncan Bucknell

Without them and many others who have, from time to time, shared our posts with their readers, we could not have had such a successful first year of blogging. It's really been more than we expected.

We've learned a lot and we're continuing to pick things up as we go. And we're adding new features to make this blog even more useful, to us and our readers. More about that in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy as much as we do the many useful IP Resources, Tech Blogs, Business Blogs, and IP Blogs that are already linked in the sidebar blogrolls here on Securing Innovation. If you think of others we should link, please let us know in the comments below. Thanks for all your help.

We've Got Much To Be Thankful For

tcolson@ip.com (Thomas J. Colson) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 13:25:06 -0500

I'd like to take this opportunity, on Thanksgiving Day, to thank our team at IP.com for all the good work they do every day for our great clients, and to thank them for their continuing business. While we get together with family and friends this holiday, service to our clients worldwide continues without interruption 24/7, 365 days a year.

RPX: Defensive Patent Aggregation Club

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:54:55 -0500

John Cook is co-founder and executive editor of TechFlash. He has been covering the technology beat for nearly a decade, writing about startups, entrepreneurs and venture capital, most recently serving as a reporter/blogger at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He's got a very interesting article posted on his venture blog. Here's the lead.

Intellectual Ventures co-founder Nathan Myhrvold's growing patent portfolio scares some in the technology business who believe the former Microsoft CTO will use that power as a hammer to win legal battles.

Now, two former executives of Myhrvold's Bellevue patent licensing firm are striking out on their own with support from IBM and Cisco to serve as a counterweight to patent holding firms like Intellectual Ventures. Today, RPX Corp. is launching what it dubs "defensive patent aggregation" -- a membership club of sorts where large and small technology companies pool capital in order to order to protect themselves from patent litigation.

Click here to read the full article on John Cook's Venture Blog, based on his interview with RPX founders John Amster and Geoffrey Barker. Great reporting.

Article One Partners Offers Bounty

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:08:03 -0500

Article One Partners, LLC launched as a new global community to legitimize the validity of patents. Community members, who Article One calls Advisors, have an opportunity to send in previously hard to find evidence of validity for high profile patents. By tapping the unique knowledge and referral networks of our Advisors, this publicly available evidence known as prior art can be discovered. Article One analyzes the prior art to determine whether it can show patents to be legitimized or invalid. If Article One forms an opinion that patents are invalid, Advisors earn up to U.S. $50,000, with $1,000,000 total being offered for launch. Advisors who actively build the community also earn premium compensation in Article One's Profit Sharing Plan of about five percent (5%) of the company's net annual profit.

The press release issued by Article One Partners generated a lot of press and buzz in the blogosphere last week, much of it restating the company's PR, but not all of it was uncritical.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt says the new company's business plan "sounds like a photocopy of BountyQuest's original plan."

Julian Sanchez at ars technica thinks this "crowdsourcing patent startup could use dose of own medicine."

What do you think? Will the business methods patent application of Article One Partners get past the prior art of BountyQuest? And what about Bilski?

UPDATE: Cheryl Milone, President, articleonepartners.com comments below.

World Toilet Day and the Flapperless Toilet

blog@ip.com (IP) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:24:01 -0500

World Toilet Organization (WTO) is a global non- profit organization committed to improving toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide.

November 19th was declared 'World Toilet Day' in 2001 by 17 toilet associations around the world. Since then there has been established an annual World Toilet Summit and many other regional conferences. Each toilet association has also engaged in many activities promoting clean toilets in their own respective country. There's even a World Toilet College.

World Toilet Day has become a global platform for academics, sanitation experts, toilet designers, environmentalists etc. to share the latest on rural and urban toilets.

In other toilet news, Philip and Arnold Hennessy of Toronto were awarded a $10,000 cash prize and a coveted Manning Innovation Award for 2008. Their patented innovation, the Flapperless, Tip-Bucket Toilet is designed to reduce the water wasted in conventional toilets through flapper valve leakage.

The $10,000 award is in Canadian Dollars, so they're not all that flush.

Patent Search Professional Wanted

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:12:55 -0500

Click here for details, posted on IP.com while this job search is open. Patent Search Professionals conduct patentability, infringement, freedom to operate and validity searches of patents and other prior art on behalf of innovative companies. Searchers compare inventor technical disclosures with known prior art in order to make determinations regarding the existence of patents or literature which include the novel aspects of the disclosure. Documented results are prepared in a professional report delivered to the client.

IP.com provides companies with the tools and solutions to better manage their intellectual property (IP) and innovation records. Our initial product, the IP.com Prior Art Database, was created to provide companies with a fast and effective, centralized outlet for publishing and searching technical disclosures. Since its inception, the IP.com Prior Art Database has continued to grow, attracting high profile clients such as IBM, General Electric, Motorola, Abbott Laboratories, and Eastman Kodak (to name a few). More importantly, it is searched and cited daily by patent examiners worldwide.

IP.com’s InnovationQ platform provides solutions for managing the information, records, and processes associated with innovation and IP. InnovationQ is a robust software framework which delivers functions including sophisticated workflows, collaborative environments, and legally safeguarded document management. Utilizing this framework, IP.com creates configurable modules that provide integrated company-specific solutions. InnovationQ allows companies to improve their processes and derive new and additional value from their innovation and IP assets.

IP.com also excels at delivering the highest quality patent searches. Our multilingual and multidisciplinary search team ensures that we have specialized agents covering all technical domains. IP.com employs a proven process for managing each search project which delivers timely, accurate, and concise results.

The IP.com Creative Registry is a web-based registry that allows you to upload your documents and creative work for legal safeguarding. IP.com digitally fingerprints and date-stamps your work while placing it into a private archive for your personal access. IP.com then publishes the fingerprint and date into the public domain as a testament to the existence of your work. Your actual document is NEVER exposed to anyone else, yet you have irrefutable proof of it's content at the precise time it was safeguarded!

IP.com CEO Speaking at PATINEX 2008

blog@ip.com (IP) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 03:59:37 -0500

Johnson Kong, Executive Vice President and Head of Asia Pacific for IP.com Inc., is in Korea with Tom Colson, our CEO, who addressed an international group of thought leaders gathering at PATINEX 2008.

IP.com Inc. CEO Tom Colson's presentation was on Advanced Enterprise Management and IP Strategies.

The keynote address for PATINEX 2008 was by KAIST President Nam-Pyo Suh, who spoke on the Strategy of Patent Information Usage for Finding a New Market.

After this conference, Johnson Kong and Tom Colson are continuing on to Beijing and other centers in Asia that are regular stops for executives from IP.com Inc.

Readers can follow at @ipdotcom on Twitter, where we're following other leaders in the technology space, like Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Here's how Jonathan Schwartz explains how Twitter helps him run Sun:

"Communication is a key part of leadership—as CEO, I need to engage the market, inside and outside Sun, with whatever technology affords me the greatest possible reach. Through blogs, online news, social networking sites, or Twitter, the Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate with one another. Today, we have thousands of employees participating, engaging customers and developers across the world, 24 hours a day. And whether it's via a half-hour streaming video or a 140-character Tweet, we need to reach everyone in the forum and format they choose—not what we choose."

We're working on it, but it's still early days in the integration of Twitter feeds into this blog. However, if you add @ipdotcom to those you're following on Twitter now, you'll be sure to hear more about the latest innovations in intellectual property management and IP strategies. We look forward to reading your "tweets" and following you, too, just like we're following Jonathan Schwartz and Guy Kawasaki on Twitter.

Inventor's Day on Hedy Lamarr's Birthday

tcolson@ip.com (Thomas J. Colson) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:30:53 -0500

Duncan Bucknell at IP Think Tank is hosting Blawg Review #185, the carnival of law blogs, a special global intellectual property edition in recognition of Inventor's Day.

The birthday of Hedy Lamarr, 9 November, was chosen as Inventor’s Day not because she was an ‘Edison’, but because the Austrian-born Hollywood diva ‘tried to realise her idea’. And oh what an idea it was – an early form of spread spectrum communications technology – key to wireless communication, even today. For those who can’t resist, here’s her US patent - US 2,292,387.

So let’s celebrate the spark of creativity, the spirit of innovation that keeps the world of IP and the wider world beyond such an exciting and ever-evolving space.

And next time the conversation turns to gender stereotypes, and girls in science, remember Hedy Lamarr and these women inventors who showed the world they can do anything.

IP5 Announces International Work-sharing

jkong@ip.com (Johnson Kong) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:50:30 -0500

As we head off to Asia next week, commencing our trip in Korea for PATINEX 2008, we're mindful of the recent meeting of the IP5.

The heads of five intellectual property offices (IP5) met to address the common challenges they are currently facing. The meeting was held at Jeju, Korea, on October 27 and 28, 2008, and chaired by Dr. Jung-Sik Koh, Commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO).

The other heads of the IP5 offices were Ms Alison Brimelow, President of the European Patent Office (EPO); Mr Takashi Suzuki, Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO); Mr Tian Lipu, Commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China (SIPO), and Mr Jon Dudas, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

They announced the adoption of the vision statement of work-sharing initiative among the five offices: "The elimination of unnecessary duplication of work among the offices, enhancement of patent examination efficiency and quality, and guarantee of the stability of patent right ". The offices also elaborated a cooperative framework in the form of ten Foundation Projects. These projects were devised to harmonize the search and examination environment of each office and to standardize the information-sharing process. The projects are expected to facilitate the work-sharing initiative by enhancing the quality of patent searches and examinations and building mutual trust in each other's work.

As the world sees economic barriers between nations fade away, innovators want their intellectual creations protected concurrently in major markets. Hence, applications for the same technology are filed at more than one patent office.

The heads of the five offices recognize the trend toward greater globalization and seek to minimize the resultant redundancy of patent searches and examinations. They also share a concern for the growing number of pending patent applications and the prolonged pendency period; and they acknowledge that delays in granting patents hinder the promotion of innovation, which is an intrinsic function of the patent system. To tackle this global phenomenon in an efficient manner, the IP5 offices have agreed to collaborate in moving forward with a work-sharing initiative.

Each office will oversee the implementation of two Foundation Projects. For the first step, the offices agreed that by, at the latest, the end of April 2009 they would exchange detailed proposals on each Foundation Project and strive to identify the areas of agreement as well as specific details of implementation.

The benefits of work-sharing are expected to be tangible and substantial. The number of applications filed at two or more of the IP5 offices currently stands at up to 250,000 per year. Reutilisation of the work of another office for these duplicate applications can lead to significant improvements in patent examination efficiency for all the IP5 offices.

The work-sharing among the five offices will increase the efficiency of the patent system and minimize the cost and effort of patent applicants with regard to the acquisition and management of patent rights. Consistency in the patent process will ensure the predictability of patent results when applicants lodge applications at multiple offices. Greater simplicity will increase the convenience and savings of applicants.

At the close of the meeting, the offices pledged to continue working together toward the realization of the shared vision and agreed to convene the next Heads of the five offices meeting at a time convenient to each office in 2009.

The lead offices and their assigned Foundation Projects are as follows:

Common Documentation Database (lead: EPO) - Aim: To bring together a common set of relevant patent and nonpatent literature from around the world to assist patent examiners in their prior art searches
Common Approach for a Hybrid Classification (lead: EPO) - Aim: To enable joint and efficient updating of patent classification and facilitate the reuse of work among the patent offices
Common Application Format (lead: JPO) - Aim: To facilitate the filing procedure of each office by using a Common Application Format; and by using electronic or digitized patent application filing (in XML format) and subsequent processing and publication in XML format
Common Access to Search and Examination Results (lead: JPO) - Aim: To enable examiners to find one-stop references in the dossier information of other offices, such as search and examination results and to conduct the priority document exchange (PDX) to reduce the cost of ordering copies of priority documents for applicants and the administrative costs of electronic processing for offices
Common Training Policy (lead: KIPO) - Aim: To standardize the training of patent examiners at each office, helping examiners to produce equivalent results of search and examination at the five offices
Mutual Machine Translation (lead: KIPO) - Aim: To help the offices overcome the language barrier of patent information and allow greater access to each other’s patent information
Common Rules for Examination Practice and Quality Control (lead: SIPO) - Aim: To execute patent examinations at a similar standard and quality through common rules of examination practice and quality control
Common Statistical Parameter System for Examination (lead: SIPO) - Aim: To establish a system of common statistical parameters for all examinations at the five offices; and to conduct statistical tasks and exchange information on examination practices under common rules and parameters, building on the work of the Trilateral statistical working group
Common Approach to Sharing and Documenting Search Strategies (lead: USPTO) - Aim: To promote reutilization by enabling the patent examiners of each office to understand each other’s search strategy
Common Search and Examination Support Tools (lead: USPTO) - Aim: To establish a system of common search and examination tools to facilitate work-sharing

End of Life for IP

tpetrocelli@ip.com (Tom Petrocelli) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:35:47 -0500

As I continued thinking about the IP lifecycle, something occurred to me. Most companies put a lot of energy and money into creating and acquiring intellectual property. Not nearly as much time and effort goes into IP that is at the end of its life.

That's unfortunate since maintaining old IP costs money. It also represents a lost opportunity for one last revenue stream from an old standby. In a sense, selling IP is like the old garage sale adage "one person's junk is another's treasure." And like selling something at garage sale, you have to know you want to sell it, know how much you want to sell it for, and understand its value to someone else.

The hard part about IP divestiture is that so many constituents are involved, and there can be a lot of emotion involved. For the inventor, some of themselves is tied up in the IP. If their name is on the patent, they may not want to see another company, especially a competitor, using it. If the IP has been part of a very successful product, there may be an overinflated sense of its value.

Unlike a lot of IP decisions, the simple, gated workflow doesn't really apply. Decisions around end of life divestiture are more collaborative. They require that the constituents add their knowledge and express their views about the IP. Otherwise a true picture of the market, value, and continued internal usefulness of the IP will not emerge.

There are a number of well known techniques that can help drive this type of decision. Meetings are one way. Unfortunately, scheduling the number of constituents can be a challenge. People often don't have all the information they need when they come into the meeting leading to tabled decisions and more meetings.

Collaborative software, which allows participants to review and comment on the IP in question, is a good tool to use assuming it's secure and safe. A method of voting on IP also helps. By using standard survey methods, the attitudes of the constituents can be divined and better decisions made. Sometimes, thematic analysis of comments is needed since not all information is easily quantifiable. No matter what methods are used, typical top down decision making is not adequate.

Divestiture decisions are complex and require complex interactions between knowledgeable people. Since InnovationQ strives to be a complete IP lifecycle product, it has different collaboration and decision support features. IP.com continues to address the entirety of IP management and not just the legal aspects.

As someone who worries about how to leverage intellectual property, I see a lost opportunity. Management of the entire IP lifecycle is necessary to get the most leverage from these important assets. This includes managing the end of life.

The Best Inventions of the Year

blog@ip.com (IP) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:04:59 -0500

From a genetic testing service to an invisibility cloak to an ingenious public bike system to the world's first moving skyscraper — here are TIME's picks for the top innovations of 2008.

Browse the complete list of the 50 best inventions at this link.

Click here to watch the video.

Feel free to discuss any of these inventions in the comments below. Which do you think is the most innovative?

IP Think Tank Global Week in Review

blog@ip.com (IP) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:22:21 -0500

Duncan Bucknell's IP ThinkTank Global Week in Review is published every Friday. This week's highlights include:

US publishers and Google settle copyright litigation over Google Book Search Library Project (The Trademark Blog) (Intellectual Property Watch) (EXCESS COPYRIGHT) (Law360) (Lessig Blog) (Michael Geist) (Out-Law) (EFF) (Public Knowledge) (Ars Technica) (Copyfight) (Techdirt) (Law360) (IPKat) (Laurence Kaye on Digital Media Law)

10 years of Digital Millenium Copyright Act (Public Knowledge) (Techdirt) (Michael Geist) (Public Knowledge) (Public Knowledge) (Public Knowledge) (Public Knowledge) (Public Knowledge) (Public Knowledge) (EFF) (Public Knowledge) (EFF) (Ars Technica) (Public Knowledge) (Techdirt) (EFF)

CAFC greatly limits software and business method patents: In re Bilksi (The IP ADR Blog) (Techdirt) (Managing Intellectual Property) (Hal Wegner) (Law360) (IAM) (Peter Zura's 271 Patent Blog) (PLI) (PLI) (Patently-O) (Patent Prospector) (Anticipate This!) (Ars Technica)

EPO President Alison Brimelow asks Enlarged Board of Appeal to address questions about patentability of software in Europe (Hal Wegner) (Managing Intellectual Property) (Ars Technica) (IPKat) (IAM) (Managing Intellectual Property)

Belgium: ISP Scarlet successfully overturns court order requiring it to use filter to stop file sharing (Techdirt) (Ars Technica) (Managing Intellectual Property) (Out-Law) (The Trademark Blog) (Out-Law)

Read the complete review here and subscribe to this must-read roundup of the best of the intellectual property news compiled weekly by the Duncan Bucknell Company.

MIT's Technology Licensing Office

blog@ip.com (IP) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:31:13 -0500

Defensive publishing, patents, and technology transfers are regular topics of discussion here on Securing Innovation, the corporate weblog of IP.com Inc., so we thought our readers in academia would be interested in the following press release, issued today.

(Media-Newswire.com) - Publishing academic papers is a top priority for MIT researchers, but they should also be aware of the need to protect their inventions with patents. That's where MIT's Technology Licensing Office can help.

The movement of knowledge and discoveries from MIT to the general public has had a major impact on economic development and job creation, both nationally and locally. Patent protection is critical to these activities.

At any given time, more than 1,000 MIT researchers -- faculty, postdocs, research staff and students -- are inventors on patents being filed or prosecuted through the TLO. More than half of these patents will eventually be licensed to companies for development and commercialization with the hope of impacting the "real world." The TLO grants more than 100 licenses a year, many involving a suite of patents; between 20 and 30 of these go to start-up companies.

Why patents matter

Companies' investments in "university stage" inventions are typically very risky, because neither the technical practicality nor the market potential of the technology is established. Often very substantial financial investment is needed to bring them to market -- with substantial risk that the investment will not pay off. Strong patent protection is a company's best protection from later competitors if the product is successfully brought to market.

In a global economy, worldwide patent protection is most valuable. But, except in the United States ( and a few much smaller countries ), any public disclosure before a priority patent is filed will bar filing for patent protection. Public disclosure can include written publications, Internet descriptions, poster sessions and even public talks.

Fortunately, only one priority patent need be filed in the United States before the public disclosure. This then preserves the possibility of later filing for international patents.

How to protect your invention

The TLO encourages researchers with a potential invention to submit a Technology Disclosure form -- available for download -- at the time a first rough draft is made of a potential publication, poster session, or planned talk to anything other than an all-MIT audience. The form will ask for the anticipated date of first public disclosure.

Upon receipt of the Technology Disclosure, the TLO will evaluate whether the invention appears to have commercial potential. If time allows prior to public disclosure, the TLO will also ask a member of the inventing team -- usually a postdoc or graduate student -- to meet with the TLO's search librarian to search for "prior art" ( references, including patents, that may show prior invention by others ). A patent application will be filed if no damning prior art is found and if the invention is assessed as having potential commercial applicability.

"We hope to get Technology Disclosures at least a couple of months prior to the publication, but we will never ask the researchers to delay their publication; we understand the academic priorities," said TLO Director Lita Nelsen. "If necessary, we can file a 'rush' patent application -- but more time allows better quality."

What to do if you have already published

All is not lost if you have published before filing a patent application. Unlike in most foreign countries, U.S. patent law allows filing within one year after publication. Clearly, it's better to have worldwide patent protection, but a U.S. patent will cover any products made in the United States, wherever sold; or imported to the United States, wherever made.

It is also possible that your publication was not "enabling" -- that is, did not provide sufficient detail to enable others to replicate your invention. In this circumstance, worldwide patent protection may still be available.

Readers who have experience with the technology licensing office of any academic institution are welcome to contribute to a discussion of this topic in the comments below.

50 Most Innovative Companies for 2008

blog@ip.com (IP) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:46:07 -0500

Meet the companies that make up this year's list, as determined by BusinessWeek and the Boston Consulting Group. Click here to watch a slideshow presentation of the 50 most innovative companies in the world.

BusinessWeek Video: Abbott Laboratories

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:46:48 -0500

BusinessWeek has an online feed of interesting videos of innovative companies, including this clip in which Abbott Laboratories CEO Miles White discusses a new drug-coated stent technology that lowers a patient's risk of arteries becoming reclogged. Full disclosure: Abbott Laboratories is a client of IP.com.

General Counsel West Coast Conference

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:00:45 -0500

Corporate Counsel presents the 6th Annual General Counsel West Conference, to be held Nov. 6-7, 2008, in San Francisco. This year’s conference will focus on “Sustainability and Innovation.”

The ALM General Counsel Conference is designed to provide general counsel with access to their best and brightest peers and an understanding of what is working in the world's best legal departments. Attendees will gain insight into the innovative practices and processes in place to manage some of the most difficult corporate and legal issues of today, including:

The credit crunch

Extracting value from intellectual property

Bet-the-company litigation

Doing business in Asia

White collar crime

Electronic discovery

Sustainability and corporate social responsibility

Globalization

IP Law Review With Focus On China

blog@ip.com (IP) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 17:36:03 -0500

As the world continues to flatten and China remains a leading force for the 21st Century, corporations with large portfolios of intellectual property assets need to develop their ability to work with this rising super power.

IP Law Review, a two day intensive event at the Westin Times Square in New York City on October 29th and 30th, presented by IP Law & Business investigates the federal decisions and industry trends guaranteed to change IP in the financial markets, including:

Business Method Patents and In re Bilski
Shareholder Derivative Suits Based on Mismanaged IP
Protecting your IP in the Emerging Markets

According to the conference overview, IP Law Review is specifically designed for:

General Counsel
Chief IP Counsel
Chief Patent Counsel
Senior IP Counsel
IP Litigators
IP Advisors
IP Portfolio Managers
IP professionals involved in protecting and developing copyrights, trademarks and patents

Tom Colson, a registered Patent Attorney and CEO of IP.com, and Johnson Kong, Executive Vice President, Asia Pacific, are establishing new business strategies with companies managing intellectual property in China.

IP.com at AIPLA Annual Meeting

blog@ip.com (IP) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:27:55 -0500

IP.com Inc. is one of the exhibitors at the American Intellectual Property Law Association annual meeting, which is being held today and for the next few days at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC.

The American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) is a national bar association constituted primarily of lawyers in private and corporate practice, in government service, and in the academic community, with more than 17,000 members. The AIPLA represents a wide and diverse spectrum of individuals, companies and institutions involved directly or indirectly in the practice of patent, trademark, copyright, and unfair competition law, as well as other fields of law affecting intellectual property. Its members represent both owners and users of intellectual property.

If you're attending, please stop by Booth #48 and say hello to Michael Inglisa and see how IP.com's products and solutions can help you and your clients manage large portfolios of intellectual property assets.

InnovationQ Features & Benefits

blog@ip.com (IP) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:27:51 -0500

InnovationQ is an enterprise software platform developed by IP.com Inc. for clients that automates and streamlines common intellectual property management functions. If your organization has a substantial investment in intellectual property, InnovationQ can help you safeguard its intellectual property assets and make better decisions about those assets. More important, InnovationQ allows you to derive maximum value from your intellectual property portfolio. It helps you automate and enhance most of the major tasks associated with intellectual property management including protecting trade secrets.

In a series of posts here on our corporate blog, Securing Innovation, we've recently looked at how InnovationQ helps our clients manage important facets of their intellectual property assets in these four areas:

1. Invention Review Process
2. Trade Secret Management
3. Publication Clearance System
4. R&D Collaboration

InnovationQ Features

The Workflow Engine - The Workflow Engine is software that implements a document workflow process. Workflow processes are standard paths that a document is passed along for review and approval. These can be configured to meet more specific needs. Convenient options to delegate your responsibility or seek consultation on a specific document are available.

A Document Repository - A software platform that stores and organizes documents. It includes the following features:

Document storage and multi-categorization

Full text search

Document event tracking

Document event alerts

Reports of user and document activity

Collaborative Innovation - The Collaborative Innovation Module provides customers with the ability to send documents to other members of their team for comment and revision. It facilitates innovation through structured collaboration.

Roles-based Access Control – Administrators can develop different sets of permissions, or rules, which govern what a user (or groups of users) can do within the system.

Automated Invention Scanning/Scrubbing – Enables companies to rapidly align and evaluate technologies for consideration of further investment.

Integrated Prior Art Searching – Seamlessly search peripheral databases including IP.com’s Prior Art Database, U.S. patents and patent applications.

Legal Safeguarding – All documents loaded into the InnovationQ system are automatically date-stamped and digitally fingerprinted for verification.

InnovationQ Benefits

InnovationQ helps make processes more efficient and less error prone
Offers a secure and legally defensible, document management environment
Extremely easy to use – dramatically reducing training time and costs
Quick to deploy – the web-based application requires no on-site hardware or software
Future enhancements – constant focus on solving the problems of innovation management from IP.com
InnovationQ allows you to mine your intellectual property for product ideas
InnovationQ provides a solid ROI. Thorough IP asset protection at a cost that is relatively low compared to the value of the assets

Dynamic Tools for R&D Collaboration

blog@ip.com (IP) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:10:13 -0500

R&D Collaboration

As we rapidly move from paper records to electronic one, an R&D Collaboration system can be a powerful tool for scientists and engineers. Not only are documents instantly shared across departments and locations, with date-stamping, archiving, and categorization for easy retrieval. For the first time, R&D managers and legal staff can strategically oversee the innovation activity of their organization. With an R&D Collaboration system, managers and in-house counsel can get ahead of innovation and be proactive about innovation decisions.

Collaboration in the R&D environment

A strong R&D Collaboration system must enable:

Storage of research documents with access controls
Security of the documents so that sensitive information does not leak
Search for documents for interesting ideas generated by others
Sharing findings and papers with others, inside and outside the organization
Reporting of all document and user activity and trends

All the while, documents must be authenticated so that they may be used later in patent applications and safeguarded as trade secrets. It is also important that access to critical documents be tightly controlled so as to maintain both the security and integrity of vital information.

To read more about dynamic tools for innovation management see this overview.