Innography Blog

This is a transcript of the webinar The Million Dollar Risk hosted by Gene Quinn, founder, and editor of IP Watchdog, which is available now on demand.

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I thought I’d take a break from the technology view of the world and pivot to the business side of things. One of the most frequently asked questions is, “What’s the value of this patent?” This is a very hard question to answer on a number of levels, but mainly because a patent’s value isn’t just based on what it covers technically, but commercially as well. Without both points of view, the valuation is incomplete. And of course, commercial context is not covered in a patent document.

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The launch of IdeaScout is a project that's been in the works for nine years. We took a moment to chat with its ideator (and founder of Innography), Tyron Stading, about the project, and why he thinks it's a game-changer for innovation management and how ideas will be brought to market in the future.

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Most portfolio managers get a list of patents with fees due that quarter. Their job is to look at the business, see which ones they’re using, and pay the fees. They’ll likely let the rest lapse in order to “save” cost on assets not currently supporting the business. But what these managers aren’t considering can be best described by the old saying, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” Put more directly, you can create easy income for your organization simply by selling unused assets, rather than just allowing them to expire.

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Multi-million dollar decisions are never without risk, but basing them off questionable data is simply Russian Roulette. Getting to “good enough” or the “right” intellectual property data upon which to make decisions can be extremely time consuming, complex, short-lived. So either you’re wasting time correcting raw data from global patent offices or you’re making decisions on data that is rife with spelling errors, doesn’t reflect patent reassignments, and doesn’t account for M&A activities.

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The USPTO recently announced an expansion of PatentsView, its visualization tool for US patents. First launched a few years ago, the intent behind the tool was to make 40 years of patent filing data available for free to those interested in examining “the dynamics of inventor patenting activity over time”. In spite of being limited to patents (not applications) and with a focus only on the US, it offers some interesting visualizations around locations and citations.

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For better or worse, no one can say that 2016 was dull. And while it might not have produced quite as much excitement in the IP world (phew!), 2016 wasn’t without some notable IP shifts. On January 11th last year I shared my predictions for 2016. Let’s see how I did, and then I’ll give you my predictions for 2017.

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One of my buddies used to say “America was built by salesmen and engineers.” I think there’s a good argument for that. Edison and the light bulb, Bell and the telephone, Ford and mass production, the Wright brothers and flight, just to name a few. You can find books written on these endeavors. But there are many patents that exist that are not known or studied, but that have commercial impact. Finding stories about those is a little tougher. As an Engineer, I took part in creating several of those commercially successful patents. Here’s one of them, where my team worked a persistent problem that no one else had cracked.

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