Invention Harvesting, Selection, and IP Protection Decisions Best Practices
Increasing the number of high-value inventions, better quality, and complete invention disclosures, and improving or maintaining inventor interest and support of the patent process are key challenges in today’s intellectual property-driven companies.
The study taught us that most companies use multiple methods to identify and capture inventions, yet only a few are considered adequate. This and many facts are reported in our new report on Invention Harvesting, Selection, and IP Protection Decisions Best Practices.
This comprehensive report enables you to evaluate the following:
- Primary and most effective invention harvesting methods for capturing high-value inventions
- Pre-invention disclosure submission review practices
- Frequency of accelerated patent preparation and filing
- Frequency, timing, and responsibility of conducting patent prior art searches
- Assessment methods and criteria for intellectual property protection decisions
- Stakeholders participating in intellectual property protection decisions
- Use of intellectual property valuation scorecards
- Key strategies and factors used for patent portfolio pruning and patent divestment
Reports are available in a variety of configurations and segmentations such as industry, R&D intensity, revenue, and patent volume..
Best Practices Analysis for Invention Harvesting
Best practices lead to superior performance. The purpose of the Invention Harvesting Best Practices Analysis is to illuminate the best practices associated with invention harvesting. We analyzed a number of key practices and IP program performance metrics to provide best practices guidance.
Following are the invention harvesting practices analyzed:
- Inventors conduct formal and/or informal peer reviews before finalizing and submitting an invention disclosure.
- Formal idea evaluation and approval process is conducted prior to an inventor preparing an invention disclosure form.
- Invention ideas/disclosures are approved before inventors submit invention disclosures for formal review and/or filing decision to patent review board or legal department for review.
- Companies that have clear guidelines (documented) for selecting what should be patented.
- Companies that stated an online ID system, or a paper invention disclosure form, or an email with an invention idea is their dominant method of harvesting new inventions.
- Companies that stated IP reviews at stage-gate exits, or in-house attorney/agent meetings with engineers/scientists, patent liaison meetings with engineers/scientist, or invention harvesting group meetings are method used to harvest inventions.
- Companies that have inventors present his/her invention idea/disclosure at the Patent Review Board (PRB) meeting.
- Companies that use specific hard-and-fast quantitative criteria (scorecard) to guide our patenting decisions.
The performance metrics that we used to evaluate invention harvesting best practices and which show superior performance are:
- Percentage of invention disclosures (IDs) converted to priority patent applications
- R&D spending per ID
- R&D spending per patent application
- Percentage of patent applications scored as commercially significant or of important value
- Percentage of sales protected by patents rights
- Percentage of products or services protected by patents rights
- Percentage of IDs of strategic importance/high commercial value
- IDs per R&D spending
- Patent applications per $1mm R&D spending
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