Innovation – Intellectual Property Strategy

May 15, 2020May 15, 2020

Should you File a Divisional, Continuation, or Continuation-in-Part before your Patent Issues?

Your patent claims are allowed. Your patent is going to issue soon. Congratulations!

Make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to make an informed, strategic decision about whether to keep your patent options open by filing a new patent application and claiming priority to your allowed patent application while it is still pending.

You probably already know that patent applications can claim priority to each other. This lets applicants create a chain of applications, if they want. There are reasons to do this–sometimes the patent office restricts which claims can be examined, and other times applicants want to extend the pendency, or examination cycle, of their patent applications–and there are other reasons to avoid linking patent applications together.

April 14, 2020April 14, 2020

Top 3 Mistakes when starting your Patent Strategy

Speaking with prospective clients this week reminded me of some common, and potentially costly, mistakes that innovators make. These mistakes are the result of preconceptions about patents that can be plain wrong.

Here are 3 of the top misconceptions people have about patents.

April 3, 2020April 20, 2020

Can you explain how your Patents and IP support your Competitive Advantage?

At its core, strategy is all about competitive advantage. Strategy is fundamentally about how to gain and sustain an advantage over direct and indirect competitors. Competitors, of course, include anyone seeking or drawing revenue (or attention) from the same market segments you are pursuing.

So then, why is your IP Strategy so disconnected from competitive advantage?

March 30, 2020

Nine Ways Intellectual Property will be Impacted by COVID-19

Here are some ways I predict the IP landscape will be impacted by the devastating impacts of COVID-19. You’ll notice I only listed eight below–I saved the ninth way for you. What is the other way you think IP will change?

IP Litigation. Litigation inevitably increases after economic downturn. IP litigation will continue or increase as market scarcity increases and, consequently, competition for the same market segment rises.
IP Strategy. Businesses that lack strategic direction will seek strategic counsel and insight. The top priorities of IP owners will be 1) make sure legal teams understand business strategy and objectives, and 2) find ways to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate, implement, and report on alignment of IP Strategy with business strategy and objectives.