Overcome Those Barriers!
Even when engineers and scientists suspect that they have an invention, they often lack confidence to disclose it. Young innovators may think that their ideas are not worthwhile, or “if it were a good idea, the senior engineers and scientists would already have thought of it.” Paradoxically, senior engineers and scientists tend to believe that many new ideas are the same as things they saw long ago.
Even worse, innovators too frequently think that the requirements for patentability are much higher than they are. Then, even when an innovator recognizes an invention, other job pressures may leave little time to fill out an invention disclosure form. With a little guidance and investment of time, these barriers can be overcome, and when that happens the floodgates of invention disclosure tend to open.
Invention mining typically involves sitting with a company engineer or scientist, or a team of engineers or scientists, and starting a discussion about what they have been working on. What have you done? What challenges have you faced, and how did you overcome them? Why is that different? What made you think to do it that way? How was it done before, and why didn’t anyone do it this way previously? Why will your customers like it?
Once you get an inventor to reflect on her work by thinking along these lines, the ideas will flow. Even better, a group discussion often produces a synergistic effect: When one person volunteers an idea, others begin to remember other details, setting off a chain reaction of invention disclosures.
An invention prospector working with a company’s engineering and scientific staff can capture these ideas easily by filling out the company’s standard invention disclosure form on the fly and supplementing it with documents that the engineers have already produced in the course of their work.
Anyone can be an invention prospector, but there are advantages to having a patent attorney do the digging. In addition to experience with teasing out innovations, a patent attorney can ask other questions critical to patentability—for example, about inventorship and invention ownership.
Also, since time works against the inventor in the patent process, a patent attorney knows to ask about events that may have triggered a patent filing deadline and about foreseeable events that could jeopardize potential patent rights.
A company cannot protect innovation that it fails to recognize. Invention mining is an efficient way to capture the innovations inherent in any company’s work, yet is not as widely or consistently practiced as it could be.