This bares the question: Is innovation dead?

Hardly. For proof, look no further than the recent advances in the life sciences, including revolutionary breakthroughs in genomics and cloning. Then why is internal R&D no longer the strategic asset it once was? The answer lies in a fundamental shift in how companies generate new ideas and bring them to market. In the old model of closed innovation, firms adhered to the following philosophy: successful innovation requires control. In other words, companies must generate their own ideas that they would then develop, manufacture, market, distribute and service themselves. This approach calls for self-reliance: if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.

For most of the 20th century, this closed model worked — and it worked well. Under it, Thomas Edison was able to invent a number of landmark devices, including the phonograph and the electric light bulb, which paved the way for the establishment of General Electric’s famed Global Research Center In the chemical industry, companies like DuPont established central research labs to identify and commercialize a stunning variety of new products, such as the synthetic fibers nylon, Kevlar and Lycra. Bell Labs researchers discovered amazing physical phenomena and harnessed those discoveries to create a host of revolutionary products, including transistors and lasers.

But, toward the end of the century, the closed model began to erode due to a number of factors. Perhaps chief among these factors was the dramatic rise in the number and mobility of knowledge workers, making it increasingly difficult for companies to control their proprietary ideas and expertise. Another important factor was the growing availability of private venture capital, which has helped to finance new firms and their efforts to commercialize ideas that have spilled outside the silos of corporate research labs.

In this new model of open innovation, companies commercialize external and internal ideas by deploying new pathways to the market. Companies can commercialize internal ideas through channels outside of their current businesses in order to generate value for the organization. Some vehicles for accomplishing this include startup companies, possibly even financed and staffed with some of the company’s own personnel, licensing agreements, distribution partnerships. Ideas can also originate outside the firm’s own labs and be brought inside for commercialization. In other words, the boundary between a firm and its surrounding environment is less rigid, enabling innovation to move easily between the two.

At its root, open innovation is based on a landscape of abundant knowledge, which must be used readily if it is to provide value for the company that created it. However, an organization should not restrict the knowledge it uncovers in its research to its internal market pathways, nor should those internal pathways necessarily be constrained to bringing only the company’s internal knowledge to market. This perspective suggests some very different rules. For example, no longer should a company lock up its IP, but instead it should find ways to profit from others’ use of that technology through licensing agreements, joint ventures and other arrangements.

In the next post, we’ll be discussing successful ways to identify open innovation partners. For more information, please visit our resources section to view other open innovation materials.

IntelliSort™ provides a fast, customizable, low-cost solution for Intellectual Property business professionals

 In today’s IP-centric business environment, patents and intellectual property (IP) play crucial roles in core business functions such as competitive intelligence, licensing, and litigation. For most companies, the first step in IP management is to classify and compare portfolios using categories that have organizational relevance.  Manual categorization processes are very expensive and resource intensive, particularly when portfolio sizes are large and contain categories that are unique to that business.  And any process that relies upon judgment calls by a diverse group of reviewers, no matter their degree of expertise, will be plagued by error and inconsistency.  In order to combat these challenges, Innography, the premier IP Business Intelligence (IPBI) company, today announced IntelliSort, the only intelligent patent categorization service designed specifically for the IP market.

With IntelliSort, Innography users can “train” the software to make intelligent decisions based on different business objectives, automating what would otherwise be a time consuming and expensive process. With IntelliSort, users can:

• Map patents to product lines internally or externally
• Broadly classify portfolios by market segment
• Map competitive patent portfolios to a specific business
• Benchmark portfolios against an industry in a context that is meaningful to business objectives

“With recent IP news of monetization, litigation and government changes, patents are clearly both a challenge and  major opportunity for companies,” said Tyron Stading, founder and president at Innography. “For the first time, we can help corporations streamline their processes with a fast, low-cost, customizable solution that allows them to categorize IP data in a way that suits their own particular business objectives.”

IntelliSort works as a patent categorization tool in which an IP professional identifies key categories that a particular set of patents may fit into based on a company’s unique IP specifications.  This best practice yields more relevant and precise results than relying on generalized systems like US and IP classifications. After providing a small sample set to train the system, large amounts of patent data can be fed into IntelliSort, which will automatically sort the patents into the user-defined subsets. This solution scales from a small number of personal categories defined by an individual to a Fortune 100 conglomerate with thousands of categories.  By automating the categorization process, IntelliSort eliminates the need to  hire subject matter experts to manually review patents and gives fast, consistent results.

Innography will offer IntelliSort with a combination of consulting and education services designed to provide rapid time-to-value for those implementing the IntelliSort solution. To learn more about the services included with Innography’s IntelliSort, please click here.

IntelliSort is ideal for the following:

Portfolio Acquisition

• Automatically recommend portfolios of interest based on historical acquisitions
• Create internal workflows to automatically assign patent portfolios to experts for review
• Identify highly important patents, such as those related to certain standards

Monetization and Licensing

• Locate similar portfolios to identify potential licensing candidates

• Train a classifier to learn a specific company’s products or technologies
• Create industry or technology specific categories for market segmentation
• Classify the patents in a portfolio according to which companies or products they map most closely

Competitive Benchmarking

• Benchmark one’s portfolio versus the industry using meaningful technology categories
• Break down competitors’ portfolios that align most closely with individual products or patents

Mergers and Acquisitions

• Easily view acquired company’s portfolio using internal categories.
• When divesting or breaking up a company, accurately decide which patents stay and which should be sold

Portfolio Management and Maintenance

• Classify patents by product, platform or strategic initiative
• Use in maintenance decisions

We expect the number of patent filings will increase dramatically since inventors will be motivated to file early and often to secure the patent and profit from their innovation. But this increase will inherently cause a challenge in the speed to get a patent to market faster.  This means that competitive advantage will be found in quickly understanding the intellectual property landscape, speeding the processes associated with due diligence on prior art, and streamlining the collection of information needed to initiate the filing process.

This is where Innography customers will always come out ahead. With our advanced capabilities to find the most relevant and accurate information from comprehensive data sources, our customers will ensure they have the best information, as quickly as possible. Using our unique analysis and visualizations to uncover insightful relationships amongst that information, our customers will also maximize their ability to profit from the America Invents Act.

We at Innography are excited about this change in patent law, and look forward to helping our customers navigate the changing patent world. Happy innovating!

Keeping patent titles in check is becoming a critical business function, yet remains a challenge for today’s IP-centric corporations.  The most common use cases include M&A due diligence, IP monetization/licensing, and litigation due diligence.  Each of these scenarios potentially represents millions of dollars to the company, and yet the due diligence for chain of title leaves much to be desired, with only 50 percent or so of the issues being found in conventional due diligence processes. In fact, we’ve estimated that lack of record controls and monitoring add up to over $7 billion worth of patents stricken with title issues.

There are several instances that contribute to chain of title problems such as missing inventor assignments, security liens on patents, misreported M&A, recordation issues, theft, and a host of other fascinating examples.  A simple human entry error such as a typo could jeopardize the patent value. And these are relatively simple cases of how title issues can compromise patent ownership, so imagine the problems that occur once bankruptcy, mergers & acquisitions, licensing, partnerships, or even fraud or theft come into the picture.

In response to this growing issue we created PatentGuard™, the world’s first automated IP Title Assurance Platform. PatentGuard is a managed service from Innography that provides portfolio managers and attorneys with an audit report of potential issues, as well as recommending corrective actions to resolve them, assuring the asset is properly protected.  Following an initial scan, PatentGuard can be used to provide an ongoing, cost-effective monitoring service to mitigate future patent title risks.

This is just another example of how we at Innography listen to our customers, and provide IP-related solutions that are growing the IP financial marketplace. For more information on PatentGuard, call us at 1.512.306.8688. We look forward to seeing how we can help you protect your portfolio.

So many times we hear our users say they are asked to put together a ‘patent landscape’ without any real guidance on what insights they are being asked to deliver. What is the business goal? Are we looking to identify new partners? Competitive threats? Identify risks of entering a new market? Armed with a well-defined game plan, the researcher is able to streamline the search process, and produce better results in a shorter amount of time.

At Innography, this aligns with our goal to provide better information, faster; ultimately enabling our customers to make well-informed business decisions. In an effort to help our users successfully navigate the sometimes confusing and unpredictable IP landscape, we are formalizing a play book for IP analysis within Innography. The play book is made up of game plans, which identify how to run critical business analysis within the software. Each play documents not only what you can analyze, but when these analyses can be used, and why they are appropriate to the business goals of the firm. In addition to step-by-step instructions, the plays contain repeatable recipes for performing the analyses in the Innography software to enable strategists, analysts and executive decision makers to be consistent in their search functions, keeping the lines of communication clear.

Game plans for M&A due diligence, patent shopping, competitive intelligence and licensing combine a group of plays to form playbooks that deliver the right information to decision makers. These playbooks show users the necessary steps to take when looking for portfolios to acquire on the cheap (Dumpster Diving), or when they are considering assertion and trying to understand the risk of counter-suit (Counter Punch Analysis). We are developing new plays every day and have been very encouraged by the response from our customers who have told us that these will help them get to the next level of IP business strategy.

Over the next several months, you will be hearing a lot more about the playbook, as we will be posting several plays here on Innperspective. Without further ado, here is our first official play titled “Minesweeper,” which falls into the Freedom to Operate category. In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more please contact your Innography representative for more information. Have fun playing!

MINESWEEPER
Category: Freedom to Operate
Description: Patents that are asserted over and over again represent litigation land mines in the IP landscape. In addition to performing conventional patent searches, understanding which patents have been asserted, how often, by whom and to what result provides a more complete view of the IP risks when entering a new technology market.
What to analyze
Patents heavily litigated in a technology category
When appropriate
Looking for patent roadblocks when developing new products
Why
Patents that have historically been litigated against similar products or technologies have a higher likelihood of being asserted than patents with no history of litigation.

Innography Capabilities
-    Data Acquisition: Innography scans court documents from patent infringement cases to identify which patents are associated with which case.
-    Data Processing: Innography cross-indexes cases and patents to provide a deeper analysis
-   Advanced Analytics: By running the acquired data through Innography’s rigorous data processing sequence, Innography can now identify:
o    The most litigated patents and their associated cases
o    The most litigated technologies by IPC class
o    Litigation cases by technology class