There are lots of ways to protect your Company's greatest innovations. Empowering Associates to think big, collaborating to harvest good ideas, and developing patent portfolios to create competitive advantage are some of the ways. Different situations warrant different approaches and getting started is the best way to explore what is right for you.
To do this we will work with your team cultivating innovation, capturing good ideas, and discovering ways to create competitive advantage through patenting. We are eager to engage with Senior Leaders in companies and collaborate with your Company's inside or outside counsel on projects.
+ Workshops. Done well, a facilitated invention capture workshop invites Associates to hear about a challenging area that is important to the business and then journey to explore, brainstorm, and collaboratively share ideas and possible solutions.
Working in small teams, a group engaged in the process can add on to small ideas making them bigger, focus big ideas on solving meaningful business impactful needs, and provide a wealth of insights about the organization that only the diversity of thought can create in an arena of ideas. The harvesting of ideas in such workshops can be plentiful and very rewarding.
+ Idea bundling. Strategies to protect as many ideas as possible, in as few patent applications as possible can reduce patenting costs and create different kinds of much-needed flexibility. For example, buying time to shift the direction of ideas as the development team makes progress in developing solutions, when Marketing engages and forces a course correction, or when a competitor makes an unexpected move in the marketplace.
This technique is also really helpful in fast-changing emerging technology areas, where business models are being tested, when competitors may be poised to disrupt, or like in my startup when there are just way more ideas than budget and you have to operate on a shoestring to make it all fit.
+ Throw some Ink in the water, a term we use to describe capturing a lot of IP in an innovation space to deny competitors opportunities. If you are looking to protect a hot space or just needing to make sure competitors don't follow, consider letting us build out a portfolio for you.
