By Michael J Foycik Jr.
The author is a patent attorney with over 28 years experience in patents and trademarks. For further information, please email at IP1lwyr@gmail.com, or call at 877-654-3336.
An idea or any useful device or method
Each “how to patent” subject is discussed in detail below. Here are ways to get a patent.
Introduction and types of patent
Many types of ideas can be patented. Anything that has a function or use can be patented. Also, patent protection can cover many (but not all) types of business methods, most types of computer programs, new methods and processes, new chemicals and compounds, and new materials or new uses for old materials. Where the invention is for a design feature or an ornamental cover or casing, for example, then a design patent is the best way of protecting the invention. How to get a design patent, and how to patent a design, is explained in a separate section below.
How to Patent an Idea
An idea can best be protected by a utility patent application. This is also sometimes called a “regular” patent application. The idea can be explained in words and, if possible, by drawings. The drawings do not need to be like blueprints; instead, they are simplified and do not usually have to show conventional features. And, it is not necessary to have a working model.
Before getting into the details, we would like to mention that there is also something called a “provisional patent application” discussed hereunder. It gives patent pending status for one year, permitting a utility patent application to be filed at any time during that year. That is another way to get a patent. The provisional application is much less expensive than a utility patent application, and can be recommended when there is an urgent need to get a patent application on file with the US Patent Office. For example, just prior to a trade show or publication of the invention, there is an urgent need to have the idea on file with the US Patent Office. For further information, see the section below called “How to patent using a provisional patent application.”
Here's a simple example showing how to patent an idea for a very simple and amusing invention. The simple idea: add a blinking light to a pencil eraser. For the moment, we aren't concerned with whether it has been done before; we could find that out using a patent search if we wished. For now, the idea would be expressed in words in the patent application, written just as above. And, since it is possible to illustrate the idea in a drawing, we would also add a sketch showing where the light should be placed on the eraser. What else should be shown? The light should have a power source, for example a small solar panel or a small battery, and connecting wires should be shown connecting the power source to the light. Then, text is added to the patent application by describing the parts shown in the drawings, explaining possible uses and advantages, and mentioning possible alternatives that are included in the invention such as various types of light sources such as LEDs, incandescent bulbs, phosphorescent lighting, and so on.
Source >> http://internationalpatentservice.com/How-to-Patent.html
Patenting intellectual property for artificial intelligence as complex as some AI code
By: Peter J. Thompson
Benjamin Alarie, co-founder and CEO of Blue J Legal, says the patent for its AI software for legal and accounting firms is filed and pending. But in an AI world, he’s the first to admit it is far from a simple process.
“Patents take three to five years to process. At the same time, technology is moving very, very quickly. If you wait too long to patent something that’s truly innovative, it’s likely someone else will file.”
Securing intellectual property (IP) can be a major hurdle for startups at the best of times. But software – and in particular AI — brings its own unique challenges.
“There are specific complications compared to mechanical patents that are more straightforward,” Alarie says. “For example, there are a lot of nuances there in terms of what is patentable. If you have a relatively small startup, it may be advantageous to have some IP protection in order to defend your work, but it can be very expensive. The key is, how much do you want to bite off to protect yourself?”
Organizations such as TD Bank Group are recognizing the challenges facing the startup community on the IP front. It has recently announced a $30 million investment pool that will provide patent funding and expertise to new fintech ventures, so they can focus on rapid growth and innovation. “The AI domain is exploding and there is lots of potential out there,” says Tim Hogarth, vice-president, Innovation Framework & Strategies. “This program is intended to help them move faster and get done more quickly.”
Speed is only one part of the equation, however. Guy Levi, principal with Levin Consulting Group in Wyckoff, N.J., notes that the first question on the part of investors, or anyone interested in a merger and acquisition of a startup or its technology, is whether they wholly and solely own its IP. Yet the answer is not that straightforward with AI.
“Why AI is so challenging is that patent law progresses linearly, while advances in AI move more quickly creating an accelerating return situation,” he explains. “In other words, the gap between issues created by advances in AI technology and the ability of the law to address them is getting wider. Three to five years is pretty much an eternity in the AI world and any time in that process, you could be stepping into someone else’s IP.”
Carmakers are trying to steer past patent wars in bid for integrating Silicon Valley tech
One major issue is that AI startups typically use one or multiple open source software resources to build their solutions. But not all licence agreements are the same, Levi notes. “Some don’t allow you to protect your IP; others exclude you from excluding others using the source codes; while still others allow you to get a patent, but restrict you from enforcing any claim. The problem is, most companies do not know what open source they have.”
A second and intriguing challenge is that machine learning by its nature constantly writes its own code to improve itself. So who is the owner or inventor and how do you know if that code infringes on someone else’s IP?
The third conundrum is, what exactly do you protect, whether through copyright, patent or classifying it as a trade secret? Is it the source code, data set, test data sets, or other component of the process?
“These are issues we are always talking about,” Levi says.
Patents take three to five years to process. Technology is moving very, very quickly. If you wait too long to patent something, someone else will file
While it may seem insurmountable, there are some steps a startup can take when considering their IP options.
Be very clear who owns the resulting intellectual property before embarking on anything. “Sometimes people get so excited about discovering things and moving the field ahead, they can get caught unawares further down the line,” Alarie says. “If you’re part of a hackathon team for example, have a common agreement amongst the team members before you start.”
Then take the time to understand the licence agreement for the open source software you are using.
Since patent rights are based on first to file, getting an early filing date is also essential, Hogarth says. “That claim date is applicable worldwide. Hence it is critical for startups to file as early as possible, which is often when money is the tightest.”
Things could get even more complicated as the industry evolves from narrow, single task AI applications such as a cancer diagnosis or parking, to general AI that will perform more than one task (e.g. improving the quality of life on Mars), Levi says. “When we get to general AI, all bets are off.”
Source:
http://business.financialpost.com/executive/patenting-intellectual-property-for-artificial-intelligence-as-complex-as-some-ai-code
Benjamin Alarie, co-founder and CEO of Blue J Legal, says the patent for its AI software for legal and accounting firms is filed and pending. But in an AI world, he’s the first to admit it is far from a simple process.
“Patents take three to five years to process. At the same time, technology is moving very, very quickly. If you wait too long to patent something that’s truly innovative, it’s likely someone else will file.”
Securing intellectual property (IP) can be a major hurdle for startups at the best of times. But software – and in particular AI — brings its own unique challenges.
“There are specific complications compared to mechanical patents that are more straightforward,” Alarie says. “For example, there are a lot of nuances there in terms of what is patentable. If you have a relatively small startup, it may be advantageous to have some IP protection in order to defend your work, but it can be very expensive. The key is, how much do you want to bite off to protect yourself?”
Organizations such as TD Bank Group are recognizing the challenges facing the startup community on the IP front. It has recently announced a $30 million investment pool that will provide patent funding and expertise to new fintech ventures, so they can focus on rapid growth and innovation. “The AI domain is exploding and there is lots of potential out there,” says Tim Hogarth, vice-president, Innovation Framework & Strategies. “This program is intended to help them move faster and get done more quickly.”
Speed is only one part of the equation, however. Guy Levi, principal with Levin Consulting Group in Wyckoff, N.J., notes that the first question on the part of investors, or anyone interested in a merger and acquisition of a startup or its technology, is whether they wholly and solely own its IP. Yet the answer is not that straightforward with AI.
“Why AI is so challenging is that patent law progresses linearly, while advances in AI move more quickly creating an accelerating return situation,” he explains. “In other words, the gap between issues created by advances in AI technology and the ability of the law to address them is getting wider. Three to five years is pretty much an eternity in the AI world and any time in that process, you could be stepping into someone else’s IP.”
Carmakers are trying to steer past patent wars in bid for integrating Silicon Valley tech
One major issue is that AI startups typically use one or multiple open source software resources to build their solutions. But not all licence agreements are the same, Levi notes. “Some don’t allow you to protect your IP; others exclude you from excluding others using the source codes; while still others allow you to get a patent, but restrict you from enforcing any claim. The problem is, most companies do not know what open source they have.”
A second and intriguing challenge is that machine learning by its nature constantly writes its own code to improve itself. So who is the owner or inventor and how do you know if that code infringes on someone else’s IP?
The third conundrum is, what exactly do you protect, whether through copyright, patent or classifying it as a trade secret? Is it the source code, data set, test data sets, or other component of the process?
“These are issues we are always talking about,” Levi says.
Patents take three to five years to process. Technology is moving very, very quickly. If you wait too long to patent something, someone else will file
While it may seem insurmountable, there are some steps a startup can take when considering their IP options.
Be very clear who owns the resulting intellectual property before embarking on anything. “Sometimes people get so excited about discovering things and moving the field ahead, they can get caught unawares further down the line,” Alarie says. “If you’re part of a hackathon team for example, have a common agreement amongst the team members before you start.”
Then take the time to understand the licence agreement for the open source software you are using.
Since patent rights are based on first to file, getting an early filing date is also essential, Hogarth says. “That claim date is applicable worldwide. Hence it is critical for startups to file as early as possible, which is often when money is the tightest.”
Things could get even more complicated as the industry evolves from narrow, single task AI applications such as a cancer diagnosis or parking, to general AI that will perform more than one task (e.g. improving the quality of life on Mars), Levi says. “When we get to general AI, all bets are off.”
Source:
http://business.financialpost.com/executive/patenting-intellectual-property-for-artificial-intelligence-as-complex-as-some-ai-code
The Manual for Indian Startups: a guide to documents, plans, templates and agreements
By: Madanmohan Rao
Do startups really need a founders’ agreement even if they are all college classmates? How expensive is patenting in India? What are the different documentation needs and growth tools at different stages of a startup’s growth? Many such issues are addressed in the book, 'The Manual for Indian Startups.'
The book is authored by Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi (co-founder of Crayon Data), Meena Ganesh (CEO of Portea Medical), Alok Mittal (co-founder of Indifi), Sriram Subramanya (founder of Integra Software), and Prof. S. Sadagopan (Director of IIIT-Bangalore).
“The operating models of startup ventures in India differ from the Western models,” explains Infosys Co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan in the foreword. The book provides the Indian context in terms of compliance and documentation needs, and has been supported by CII’s Startup Council.
I have listed some of the necessary documents, plans, templates and agreements in Table 1. The book ends with a state-wise list of 64 incubators in India along with hub location and contact information (see also YourStory’s Startup Hatch profiles of accelerators and incubators).
The material is spread across 142 pages and makes for a quick read, but its real value is as a handy reference and process guide to make sure a startup is on track and does not face nasty operational surprises down the road. Related books reviewed by YourStory include Startup CEO, Startup Boards, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, and Startup Checklist.
At concept stages, founders should be prepared to do a lot of experimentation and field research to arrive at proof of concept for their idea. It is important to strike a balance between capital efficiency and product or solution completeness.
The founding team should have freshness as well as expertise in some areas like product, domain, business and operations. The founders’ agreement should capture their expectations of contribution, ownership and sharing of equity, as well as ‘what if’ scenarios (eg: redefinitions of roles further down the road; non-compete clauses). There should also be clauses for dispute detection, resolution, mediation, and arbitration.
In the entity-creation phase, most VCs and public funds require the creation of a public limited company. Founders should understand the nuances of holding companies, regional operating firms, overseas registration, and point of effective management (POEM) laws. Early-stage compliance applies to labour laws, environmental laws, IPR, liability acts, taxation, and public procurement.
On the intellectual property front, founders should carefully weigh patent jurisdiction, novelty, licensing, and portfolio management. Patent analytics helps make informed decisions on tech trends, R&D/M&A deals, and even talent management.
For startups filing for patents, there should be clear demarcation of public information, confidential information (only for employees), and classified information (only for core team). The authors advise founders to invest in creation, protection, and monetising of IP as relevant; it can also be a long, tedious, and costly process.
Marketing online and offline should be guided by market size, market wealth, competitive presence, and value proposition. Startups should have clear strategies for targeting customers, employees, media and investors.
There will be different Above the Line (ATL) and Below the Line (BTL) considerations for B2C and B2B contexts. Commission models and network effects will take some time to kick in, but can be well worth the wait.
Funding options include seed funding (Rs 10–30 lakh for 1–3 percent equity), angel funding (Rs 70 lakh–7 crore for 15–29 percent equity), and Series A (starting at Rs 14 crore, for a 24-month runway and 20 percent stake). A full-time finance person is required from angel-funded stage onwards, and a balance between market share and profit share will need to be struck at the Series A stage. Startups seeking the accelerator route may find that some companies make investments while others give grants.
Provisions and outcomes should be made for raising funds in multiple tranches and bridge rounds, along with requirements like board rights for directors and observers. Alignment between founder and investor is key for long-term success, especially with respect to exit rights and transfer rights.
In sum, the book gives a good conceptual overview with operational insights for new founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. Other resources, consultants, professionals and mentors will add further value as the startup scales (see also the article Understanding the science and art of engaging advisors and mentors).
Source:
https://yourstory.com/2017/11/the-manual-for-indian-startups-a-guide-to-documents-plans-templates-and-agreements/
Do startups really need a founders’ agreement even if they are all college classmates? How expensive is patenting in India? What are the different documentation needs and growth tools at different stages of a startup’s growth? Many such issues are addressed in the book, 'The Manual for Indian Startups.'
The book is authored by Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi (co-founder of Crayon Data), Meena Ganesh (CEO of Portea Medical), Alok Mittal (co-founder of Indifi), Sriram Subramanya (founder of Integra Software), and Prof. S. Sadagopan (Director of IIIT-Bangalore).
“The operating models of startup ventures in India differ from the Western models,” explains Infosys Co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan in the foreword. The book provides the Indian context in terms of compliance and documentation needs, and has been supported by CII’s Startup Council.
I have listed some of the necessary documents, plans, templates and agreements in Table 1. The book ends with a state-wise list of 64 incubators in India along with hub location and contact information (see also YourStory’s Startup Hatch profiles of accelerators and incubators).
The material is spread across 142 pages and makes for a quick read, but its real value is as a handy reference and process guide to make sure a startup is on track and does not face nasty operational surprises down the road. Related books reviewed by YourStory include Startup CEO, Startup Boards, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, and Startup Checklist.
At concept stages, founders should be prepared to do a lot of experimentation and field research to arrive at proof of concept for their idea. It is important to strike a balance between capital efficiency and product or solution completeness.
The founding team should have freshness as well as expertise in some areas like product, domain, business and operations. The founders’ agreement should capture their expectations of contribution, ownership and sharing of equity, as well as ‘what if’ scenarios (eg: redefinitions of roles further down the road; non-compete clauses). There should also be clauses for dispute detection, resolution, mediation, and arbitration.
In the entity-creation phase, most VCs and public funds require the creation of a public limited company. Founders should understand the nuances of holding companies, regional operating firms, overseas registration, and point of effective management (POEM) laws. Early-stage compliance applies to labour laws, environmental laws, IPR, liability acts, taxation, and public procurement.
On the intellectual property front, founders should carefully weigh patent jurisdiction, novelty, licensing, and portfolio management. Patent analytics helps make informed decisions on tech trends, R&D/M&A deals, and even talent management.
For startups filing for patents, there should be clear demarcation of public information, confidential information (only for employees), and classified information (only for core team). The authors advise founders to invest in creation, protection, and monetising of IP as relevant; it can also be a long, tedious, and costly process.
Marketing online and offline should be guided by market size, market wealth, competitive presence, and value proposition. Startups should have clear strategies for targeting customers, employees, media and investors.
There will be different Above the Line (ATL) and Below the Line (BTL) considerations for B2C and B2B contexts. Commission models and network effects will take some time to kick in, but can be well worth the wait.
Funding options include seed funding (Rs 10–30 lakh for 1–3 percent equity), angel funding (Rs 70 lakh–7 crore for 15–29 percent equity), and Series A (starting at Rs 14 crore, for a 24-month runway and 20 percent stake). A full-time finance person is required from angel-funded stage onwards, and a balance between market share and profit share will need to be struck at the Series A stage. Startups seeking the accelerator route may find that some companies make investments while others give grants.
Provisions and outcomes should be made for raising funds in multiple tranches and bridge rounds, along with requirements like board rights for directors and observers. Alignment between founder and investor is key for long-term success, especially with respect to exit rights and transfer rights.
In sum, the book gives a good conceptual overview with operational insights for new founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. Other resources, consultants, professionals and mentors will add further value as the startup scales (see also the article Understanding the science and art of engaging advisors and mentors).
Source:
https://yourstory.com/2017/11/the-manual-for-indian-startups-a-guide-to-documents-plans-templates-and-agreements/
Stronger Patents, More Startups, Better Economy
By: BRYAN PATE
I didn’t set out to start a company. However, in 2005 I had a problem that no one else had solved. After years of contact sports and serving in the Marine Corps infantry, my joints could no longer take the pounding from running. I wanted to continue exercising, but couldn’t stand being cooped up on an elliptical machine in the gym and always found bikes to have uncomfortable seats. So working with a friend, we invented a new machine – the world’s first elliptical bicycle. Thrilled with our success and excited to help others facing the same problem, we decided to form a company to manufacturer and sell our invention. In 2008, we left our jobs and the security of steady paychecks and founded ElliptiGO Inc.
As any entrepreneur will tell you, starting a company is a risky and expensive thing to do. Since most companies fail, it’s often the worst investment a company founder will make in their lifetime. Fortunately for us, many Americans take that risk every year, and the few who succeed generate tremendous benefits for our society.
When my co-founder and I began working on our “ElliptiGO project” in 2005, the business climate for startups was a lot different than it is today. Back then, there were many more Americans trying to start new companies. The New York Times recently reported that the rate of startups has plummeted to one of its lowest levels in decades. This decline in startups should concern us all. Startups are a critical part of our economy. They create nearly half of all new U.S. jobs and a significant amount of the innovation that drives our economy and makes our world a better place to live.
One of the leading causes of this startup decline is something that we have inflicted upon ourselves. For the past decade, there has been a concerted effort in our country to weaken the U.S. patent system. While that may not seem like a big deal, the reality is that having an enforceable patent is sometimes the determining factor for whether or not an inventor takes on the risk of actually starting a company.
There’s good reason for that. Researchers at MIT have found that startups that file patents are 35 times more likely to succeed. Scholars from Harvard and New York University similarly found that patents increase a startup’s sales growth by 51 percent and the probability of securing venture capital funding by 53 percent. I know this is true from my own experience. Having a strong patent portfolio has been our primary means of defending against foreign knock-offs. It has also helped us raise capital, attract high quality talent and land great sales partners around the world.
That’s why I’m concerned about the spate of Supreme Court cases and legislation that have weakened U.S. patent rights over the past decade. These efforts have caused the U.S. to fall from first to 10th place on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s global index of patent system strength. We’re now tied with Hungary. Not surprisingly, venture capital is fleeing to Europe and China, with our share of global venture capital investment falling from 83 percent in 1996 to near 50 percenttoday. If we don’t stop this trend, our economy and global competitiveness will be severely harmed.
Fortunately, there is bipartisan legislation currently on the table that would be a good first step towards strengthening our patent system. The “STRONGER Patents Act,” introduced by U.S. Sens. Chris Coons and Tom Cotton in June, would make it easier for patent holders to obtain injunctions so they can stop infringers from profiting off their theft while cases play out in court. It would also treat patents like any other property, as our nation’s founders intended when they included patent rights in the U.S. Constitution. Reinstating those rights would lower the risks for potential startup founders and encourage more people to bet on themselves and their innovations. It is the kind of trajectory we need to put our patent system on if we want to re-invigorate our startup culture.
When we filed our first patent in 2006, we were two guys in a garage with an idea for a product that didn’t exist. There were literally hundreds of companies better positioned than us to bring this idea into the world. My co-founder and I would not have considered starting our company if we didn’t believe in the protection and enforceability of patents. I’m glad the patent system was stronger back then and that we decided to take the risk and start a company. I’m not sure we would have had the guts to start our company if the patent system back then was what it is now. That needs to change and that change can’t start soon enough.
Source:
https://morningconsult.com/opinions/stronger-patents-more-startups-better-economy/
I didn’t set out to start a company. However, in 2005 I had a problem that no one else had solved. After years of contact sports and serving in the Marine Corps infantry, my joints could no longer take the pounding from running. I wanted to continue exercising, but couldn’t stand being cooped up on an elliptical machine in the gym and always found bikes to have uncomfortable seats. So working with a friend, we invented a new machine – the world’s first elliptical bicycle. Thrilled with our success and excited to help others facing the same problem, we decided to form a company to manufacturer and sell our invention. In 2008, we left our jobs and the security of steady paychecks and founded ElliptiGO Inc.
As any entrepreneur will tell you, starting a company is a risky and expensive thing to do. Since most companies fail, it’s often the worst investment a company founder will make in their lifetime. Fortunately for us, many Americans take that risk every year, and the few who succeed generate tremendous benefits for our society.
When my co-founder and I began working on our “ElliptiGO project” in 2005, the business climate for startups was a lot different than it is today. Back then, there were many more Americans trying to start new companies. The New York Times recently reported that the rate of startups has plummeted to one of its lowest levels in decades. This decline in startups should concern us all. Startups are a critical part of our economy. They create nearly half of all new U.S. jobs and a significant amount of the innovation that drives our economy and makes our world a better place to live.
One of the leading causes of this startup decline is something that we have inflicted upon ourselves. For the past decade, there has been a concerted effort in our country to weaken the U.S. patent system. While that may not seem like a big deal, the reality is that having an enforceable patent is sometimes the determining factor for whether or not an inventor takes on the risk of actually starting a company.
There’s good reason for that. Researchers at MIT have found that startups that file patents are 35 times more likely to succeed. Scholars from Harvard and New York University similarly found that patents increase a startup’s sales growth by 51 percent and the probability of securing venture capital funding by 53 percent. I know this is true from my own experience. Having a strong patent portfolio has been our primary means of defending against foreign knock-offs. It has also helped us raise capital, attract high quality talent and land great sales partners around the world.
That’s why I’m concerned about the spate of Supreme Court cases and legislation that have weakened U.S. patent rights over the past decade. These efforts have caused the U.S. to fall from first to 10th place on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s global index of patent system strength. We’re now tied with Hungary. Not surprisingly, venture capital is fleeing to Europe and China, with our share of global venture capital investment falling from 83 percent in 1996 to near 50 percenttoday. If we don’t stop this trend, our economy and global competitiveness will be severely harmed.
Fortunately, there is bipartisan legislation currently on the table that would be a good first step towards strengthening our patent system. The “STRONGER Patents Act,” introduced by U.S. Sens. Chris Coons and Tom Cotton in June, would make it easier for patent holders to obtain injunctions so they can stop infringers from profiting off their theft while cases play out in court. It would also treat patents like any other property, as our nation’s founders intended when they included patent rights in the U.S. Constitution. Reinstating those rights would lower the risks for potential startup founders and encourage more people to bet on themselves and their innovations. It is the kind of trajectory we need to put our patent system on if we want to re-invigorate our startup culture.
When we filed our first patent in 2006, we were two guys in a garage with an idea for a product that didn’t exist. There were literally hundreds of companies better positioned than us to bring this idea into the world. My co-founder and I would not have considered starting our company if we didn’t believe in the protection and enforceability of patents. I’m glad the patent system was stronger back then and that we decided to take the risk and start a company. I’m not sure we would have had the guts to start our company if the patent system back then was what it is now. That needs to change and that change can’t start soon enough.
Source:
https://morningconsult.com/opinions/stronger-patents-more-startups-better-economy/
SUCCESSFULLY NAVIGATING THE HARDWARE STARTUP LIFE CYCLE
By: Hardware Massive
When I first read articles about how “hardware is hard”, I felt a little bit scared about the industry I was getting into. Understanding some of the issues first timers face when launching a product made me rethink how to support our community of makers from a non-technical perspective.
After many conversations with entrepreneurs building their hardware project, I realised there might be many differences in terms of product, market and consumers, however many other similarities can be considered a common path between startups. And when it comes to the ups and downs of a startup journey, external support may turn this entire experience less hard, depending on when you decide to get support and how willing you are to accept external help.
We can trace parallels between the challenges hardware startups face and a roller coaster experience: in some moments you might be cheerful and excited to reach the top, as in others you’ll be exhausted and stressed after going all the way down.
When riding the hardware startup roller coaster for the first time, most entrepreneurs might be terrified thinking about the hardware startup journey – and some crazy ones will dive into it anyway. Depending on who you decide to partner with, you’ll see your journey from a different perspective. I hope this step by step can encourage more startups to reach out for qualified support at each step, and learn how important the process is – not only the final results. Buckle your seats and let’s enjoy the journey together!
1) The Way: Why and where do you want to go now?
So you’ve arrived at this great amusement park called startup ecosystem, and many others seem to have arrived earlier than you. This makes you even more desperate to start working on something right away! Your mind is blowing by all possibilities you’re about the enjoy with the goal to “make the world a better place!”
There’s so much going on that you don’t even know where to start from! As you watch the reactions from entrepreneurs around you, in a mixture of euphoria and fear, you observe comments about a few of them getting funded, while others complain about failures. In the end, what calls your attention is the positive voice of the ones who kept smiling, excited to point out how amazing their life is and how much they’ve learnt so far!
Before immersing into this deep experience and you start working on a new product, find a shady spot and think about your motivations.
Where do you want to head now? Considering why you came up with this idea, are you trying to solve a real problem? And does it make sense to build a physical product as part of your solution? (as time goes by, keep those questions in mind)
Also, be honest about your expectations and how willing you are to spend a significant part of your life as a startup entrepreneur. As the DIY movement spread all over the world and set a lower entry level for new inventions to take shape – with 3D printers and laser cutters accessible to different hubs, many startups have been created without a clear value proposition, and that’s what how you can differentiate yourself from hobbyists. What defines a startup is the mindset, since the beginning!
Who should join you from the start: Co-Founders, Family & Friends.
2) Immersion: Are you ready?
You could skip the line of market immersion, taking the shortcut that leads to the entrance gate, as many others have been trying do, although this won’t save you time or money – it’s going to make you even more tired, as queueing is mandatory for the rollercoaster of hardware startups. You should reach the same basic milestones: learn, build, measure. If you skip any part of the process, you might have to step back and start it over anyway: it’s hard to continue the way without some basic iterations done in-house.
All efforts to develop IoT devices can bring effective innovation to the world – and it’s great to see a clear mission driving entrepreneurship. Although ideas need some initial execution and we know that as a hardware entrepreneur, you’re excited to make it happen soon.
Prior to starting your hard work, check if your ticket is still valid today!
Benchmarking should be a continuous activity – by the time you start building something, others might have launched their own solution. Use all the tools you can to track recent industry updates and get involved with stakeholders who know what’s not available yet.
Research other products available in the market that solve the same problem and study not only the good cases but also what’s not working so well. A good exercise would be mapping the potential players who’d be interested to launch something similar to your product.
Read More >> https://hardwarenews.wevolver.com/navigating-the-hardware-startup-life-cycle/
When I first read articles about how “hardware is hard”, I felt a little bit scared about the industry I was getting into. Understanding some of the issues first timers face when launching a product made me rethink how to support our community of makers from a non-technical perspective.
After many conversations with entrepreneurs building their hardware project, I realised there might be many differences in terms of product, market and consumers, however many other similarities can be considered a common path between startups. And when it comes to the ups and downs of a startup journey, external support may turn this entire experience less hard, depending on when you decide to get support and how willing you are to accept external help.
We can trace parallels between the challenges hardware startups face and a roller coaster experience: in some moments you might be cheerful and excited to reach the top, as in others you’ll be exhausted and stressed after going all the way down.
When riding the hardware startup roller coaster for the first time, most entrepreneurs might be terrified thinking about the hardware startup journey – and some crazy ones will dive into it anyway. Depending on who you decide to partner with, you’ll see your journey from a different perspective. I hope this step by step can encourage more startups to reach out for qualified support at each step, and learn how important the process is – not only the final results. Buckle your seats and let’s enjoy the journey together!
1) The Way: Why and where do you want to go now?
So you’ve arrived at this great amusement park called startup ecosystem, and many others seem to have arrived earlier than you. This makes you even more desperate to start working on something right away! Your mind is blowing by all possibilities you’re about the enjoy with the goal to “make the world a better place!”
There’s so much going on that you don’t even know where to start from! As you watch the reactions from entrepreneurs around you, in a mixture of euphoria and fear, you observe comments about a few of them getting funded, while others complain about failures. In the end, what calls your attention is the positive voice of the ones who kept smiling, excited to point out how amazing their life is and how much they’ve learnt so far!
Before immersing into this deep experience and you start working on a new product, find a shady spot and think about your motivations.
Where do you want to head now? Considering why you came up with this idea, are you trying to solve a real problem? And does it make sense to build a physical product as part of your solution? (as time goes by, keep those questions in mind)
Also, be honest about your expectations and how willing you are to spend a significant part of your life as a startup entrepreneur. As the DIY movement spread all over the world and set a lower entry level for new inventions to take shape – with 3D printers and laser cutters accessible to different hubs, many startups have been created without a clear value proposition, and that’s what how you can differentiate yourself from hobbyists. What defines a startup is the mindset, since the beginning!
Who should join you from the start: Co-Founders, Family & Friends.
2) Immersion: Are you ready?
You could skip the line of market immersion, taking the shortcut that leads to the entrance gate, as many others have been trying do, although this won’t save you time or money – it’s going to make you even more tired, as queueing is mandatory for the rollercoaster of hardware startups. You should reach the same basic milestones: learn, build, measure. If you skip any part of the process, you might have to step back and start it over anyway: it’s hard to continue the way without some basic iterations done in-house.
All efforts to develop IoT devices can bring effective innovation to the world – and it’s great to see a clear mission driving entrepreneurship. Although ideas need some initial execution and we know that as a hardware entrepreneur, you’re excited to make it happen soon.
Prior to starting your hard work, check if your ticket is still valid today!
Benchmarking should be a continuous activity – by the time you start building something, others might have launched their own solution. Use all the tools you can to track recent industry updates and get involved with stakeholders who know what’s not available yet.
Research other products available in the market that solve the same problem and study not only the good cases but also what’s not working so well. A good exercise would be mapping the potential players who’d be interested to launch something similar to your product.
Read More >> https://hardwarenews.wevolver.com/navigating-the-hardware-startup-life-cycle/
Economic Benefits of Intellectual Property Rights
By: Shrivatsav.n
1. Introduction
The question of how Intellectual Property Rights affect the processes of economic development and its growth is complex and based on multiple variables. In theory stronger systems for the protection of intellectual property could either enhance or limit economic growth. Nevertheless, evidence is emerging that stronger and more certain intellectual property law could well increase the economic growth and foster beneficial change, thereby improving developmental prospects, if they are structured in a manner that promotes effective and dynamic competition.
As the global protection regime strengthens due to TRIPS, numerous questions arise about the impact on prospects of economic growth. For a lot of reasons, it is not possible to confidently say that the new regime will raise economic growth and improve development process. There are two major reasons. First, many variables affect the growth in ways that can dominate the impact of TRIPS. Second, economic theory points out that intellectual property rights could have a lot of effects on growth, some positive and some negative.
With this background the paper addresses how Intellectual Property Rights may improve economic development.
2. Economic Development and Intellectual Property Rights
Economic analysis of Intellectual Property Rights is utilitarian, questioning whether the benefits of any system outweigh its costs, both in static and dynamic terms. The anticipated benefits and costs depend on characteristics of markets, products and social institutions.
2a. The Purposes and Mechanisms of Intellectual Property Rights
There are two main economic objectives of any system of intellectual property protection. The first is to promote investments in knowledge creation and business innovation by establishing exclusive rights to use and sell newly developed technologies, goods and services. Not providing such rights would lead to economically valuable information could be appropriated without compensation by competitive rivals; hence institutions and individuals would be reluctant to invest money and effort into research and commercialisation activities. The second goal is to promote widespread dissemination of new knowledge by encouraging or requiring rights holders to place their inventions and ideas on the market. Economically, it is efficient to provide wide access to new technologies and products, once they are developed, at marginal costs production. Such costs would be quite low as it might entail simply copying a blueprint or making another copy of a storage medium.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between these objectives. An overly protective system of IPRS could limit the social gains from invention by reducing incentives to disseminate its fruits. However, an excessively weak system could reduce innovation by failing to provide an adequate return on investment. Thus, a policy balance needs to be found that is appropriate to market conditions and conducive to growth.
Different forms of IPRS operate in distinct fashions and it is misleading to group them together. Therefore, it is helpful to mention briefly what the various mechanisms are. First, patents provide the right to prevent for 20 years the unauthorized making, selling, importing, or using of a product or technology that is recognized in the patent claim and that must demonstrate novelty and industrial utility. Related devices are utility models, or petty patents, which provide exclusive rights for a shorter period for incremental inventions, and industrial designs. In most countries patent applications are made public after a prescribed time period. Thus, patents establish a protected market advantage in return for revealing technical knowledge. Several aspects of patent scope affect the effective strength of protection.
Trademarks protect rights to market goods and services under identified names and symbols. Trademarks and brand names must be sufficiently unique to avoid confusing consumers, thereby playing the important role of reducing consumer search costs. These rights encourage firms to invest in name recognition and product quality. They also induce licensees to protect the value of assets by selling goods of guaranteed quality levels. If trademarks were not protected, rival firms could pass off their lower-quality goods as legitimate versions of those produced by recognized companies. This situation would diminish incentives for maintaining quality and would raise consumer search costs. Economists generally believe that the danger of market dominance through abuse of trademarks is slight in competitive economies but such marks could be accompanied by significant market power in countries with other barriers to entry.
Firms develop some technologies that might not be patentable, might not be worth the cost of applying for a patent, or might be more valuable if kept undisclosed. They prefer to keep knowledge of such processes proprietary as trade secrets, or undisclosed information. Trade secrets are protected by legal rules against learning by rivals through dishonest means. Such protection lapses if the technologies are discovered by fair means, such as independent invention or reverse engineering. Protecting trade secrets is beneficial to the extent it encourages the development and commercial use of sub-patentable inventions. Rules protecting trade secrets thus promote adaptive innovation and encourage learning through legal means.
Literary and artistic creations and computer software are protected by copyrights, which provide exclusive rights for some period to copy and sell particular expressions of ideas after they are fixed in some medium. Related IPRS include neighboring rights of performers and broadcasters, moral rights of original artists, and copyrights for derivative products. Like patents, copyrights are limited in scope for various purposes of public policy. The most significant limitation is the fair-use doctrine, under which it is lawful to make limited numbers of copies for research and educational purposes.
Several technologies do not fit comfortably into these traditional categories of protection. Because computer programs may contain elements of industrial utility in addition to their expressive elements, some countries make programs eligible for patents. The designs of integrated circuits typically are awarded exclusive rights for shorter time periods than patents, recognizing that semiconductor designs often embody elements of expression and that technology changes quickly in that industry. Electronic transmissions of internet materials, broadcasts, and databases may not be adequately protected by standard copyrights and two recent treaties reached in the World Intellectual Property Organization call for stronger protection in certain dimensions (WTO, 1998).
Particularly controversial, especially in developing nations, are patents for biotechnological inventions and plant breeders’ rights. It could be argued that patents generate strong and unwarranted protection in the biotechnology industry, because such inventions may not embody a truly inventive step. However, representatives of biotechnology firms claim that patents are required to encourage investment in these risky technologies. There are significant concerns that providing exclusive rights in seed varieties without significant limitations for farmers’ use and competitive research could raise costs in agriculture and reduce biodiversity over time.
A final element of an intellectual property system is its enforcement. Such enforcement entails two opposing tasks: punishing infringement by free riders and disciplining enterprises that try to extend their rights beyond intended levels by acting in an anti-competitive manner. These objectives require the development of extensive legal and scientific expertise.
3. Economic Benefits of Intellectual Property Rights
Consider now the opposite direction of causation. Economists recognize several channels through which IPRS could stimulate economic development and growth. These processes are interdependent and it is appropriate to adopt a comprehensive view of the incentives associated with intellectual property protection.
Intellectual property rights could play a significant role in encouraging innovation, product development, and technical change. Developing countries tend to have IPRS systems that favor information diffusion through low-cost imitation of foreign products and technologies. To become competitive, enterprises in developing countries typically must adopt new management and organizational systems and techniques for quality control, which can markedly raise productivity. Such investments are costly but tend to have high social returns because they are crucial for raising productivity toward global norms (Evenson and Westphal, 1995). They are more likely to be undertaken in an environment where risks of unfair competition and trademark infringement are small. Moreover, IPRS could help reward creativity and risk-taking among new enterprises and entrepreneurs. Countries that retain weak standards could remain dependent on dynamically inefficient firms that rely on counterfeiting and imitation.
An example of this process is that protection for utility models has been shown to improve productivity in countries with lagging technologies. In Brazil, utility models helped domestic producers gain a significant share of the farm-machinery market by encouraging adaptation of foreign technologies to local conditions (Dahab, 1986). Utility models in the Philippines encouraged successful adaptive invention of rice threshers (Mikkelsen, 1984).
Maskus and McDaniel (1999) considered how the Japanese patent system (JPS) affected postwar Japanese technical progress, as measured by increases in total factor productivity (TFP). The JPS in place over the estimation period 1960-1993 evidently was designed to encourage incremental and adaptive innovation and diffusion of technical knowledge into the economy. Mechanisms for promoting these processes included early disclosure of, and opposition proceedings to, patent applications, an extensive system of utility models, and narrow claim requirements in patent applications. The authors found that this system encouraged large numbers of utility model applications for incremental inventions, which were based in part on laid-open prior applications for invention patents. In turn, utility models had a strongly positive impact on real TFP growth over the period, while patent applications had a weaker but still positive effect. They concluded that utility models were an important source of technical change and information diffusion in Japan, while patent applications provided both a direct and an indirect stimulus to productivity. It is interesting to note that as Japan has become a global leader in technology creation, its patent system has shifted away from encouraging diffusion and more toward protecting fundamental technologies.
Recent studies suggest that innovation through product development and entry of new firms is motivated in part by trademark protection, even in poor nations. A survey of trademark use in Lebanon provided evidence on this point (Maskus, 1997). Lebanon has an extensive set of intellectual-property laws but they are weakly enforced. Firms in the apparel industry claimed to have a strong interest in designing apparel of high quality and style aimed at Middle Eastern markets. Such efforts have been frustrated by trademark infringement in Lebanon and in neighboring countries. Thus, local product development and establishment of new firms have been stifled by trademark infringement targeted largely at domestic enterprises.
Similar problems exist in China, as found in a second survey (Maskus, et al, 1998). While the information was anecdotal, it suggested that trademark infringement negatively affected innovative Chinese enterprises. Many examples were cited of difficulties facing Chinese producers of consumer goods, such as soft drinks, processed foods, and clothing. The establishment of brand recognition in China requires costly investments in marketing and distribution channels. Enterprises that achieved this status quickly found their trademarks applied to counterfeit products. Such products were of lower quality and damaged the reputation of the legitimate enterprise. Furthermore, this problem was difficult to overcome and, in some cases, forced enterprises to close down or abandon their trademarks. According to survey respondents, this situation had a deterrent effect on enterprise development and effectively prevented interregional marketing. In turn, enterprises were less able to achieve economies of scale. Chinese trademark infringement was concentrated on products with low capital requirements and high labor intensity. These are sectors in which China has strong comparative advantages. On this evidence, the authors concluded that trademark violations may be particularly damaging to enterprise development in poor nations.
Similar comments apply to copyrights. Copyright industries, such as publishing, entertainment, and software, are likely to be dominated by foreign enterprises (which can absorb temporary losses and afford the costs of deterring infringement) and pirate firms in countries with weak protection and enforcement. Thus, lower-quality copies would be widely available but the economy’s domestic cultural and technological development would be hampered. This situation was clear in the Lebanese survey. Lebanon has a small but vibrant film and television industry that could successfully export to neighboring economies if those countries engineered stronger copyright protection. In China, the domestic software industry has grown rapidly in the area of particular business applications, which did not suffer extensive unauthorized copying, but has faced obstacles in developing larger and more fundamental programs. Thus, domestic commercial interests in stronger copyrights have emerged and are now playing a role in promoting enforcement.
Intellectual property rights also could stimulate acquisition and dissemination of new information. Patent claims are published, allowing rival firms to use the information in them to develop further inventions. This learning process takes place in 10 to 12 months in the United States (Mansfield, 1985). Knowledge formation is cumulative and as new inventions build on past practices the process of technical change could accelerate (Scotchmer, 1991). Patents, trademarks, and trade secrets also afford firms greater certainty that they face limited threats of uncompensated appropriation. This certainty could induce them to trade and license their technologies and products more readily, enhancing their diffusion into the economy.
In strengthening their IPRS regimes, either unilaterally or through adherence to TRIPS, developing countries hope to attract greater inflows of technology. There are three interdependent channels through which technology is transferred across borders. These channels are international trade in goods, foreign direct investment (FDI) within multinational enterprises, and contractual licensing of technologies and trademarks to unaffiliated firms, subsidiaries, and joint ventures. Economic theory finds that technology transfers through each channel depend in part on local protection of IPRS, albeit in complex and subtle ways.
There are important practical implications of this analysis. First, countries with weak IPRS could be isolated from modern technologies and would be forced to develop technological knowledge from their own resources, a difficult and costly task. Second, those countries would obtain fewer spillover benefits and demonstration effects of new technologies in their economies. Third, technologies available to such nations would tend to be outdated. Finally, nations with weak IPRS would experience both limited incentives for domestic innovation and relatively few inward technology transfers.
Recent survey evidence from China supported these arguments (Maskus, et al, 1998). When interviewed, managers of many foreign enterprises expressed reluctance to locate R&D facilities in China, citing fear of misappropriation and patent infringement. Nearly all reported that their enterprises transferred technologies that were at least five years behind global standards, unless other means could be found to protect them, or brought in technologies that would be obsolete in a short time. Note that the importation of lagging technologies is not necessarily inappropriate for China’s cost conditions and such knowledge could help encourage follow-on innovation. However, as China moves toward best practices in technology the problem could become more restraining. Moreover, concerns about weak IPRS discouraged foreign enterprises from fully integrating their Chinese operations. Instead they tended to divide production processes among facilities in order to avoid revealing the full nature of their technologies in any one location.
Indeed, IPRS should encourage the development of interregional and international distribution and marketing networks that are critical for achieving economies of scale. Weak IPRS could limit incentives for such investments because rights owners would be unable to prevent their marketing outlets from debasing the quality of their products, nor could they readily deter counterfeiting of their trademarks. Thus, IPRS should permit effective monitoring and enforcement of activities throughout supply and distribution chains, providing both innovators and distributors an incentive to invest in marketing, service, and quality guarantees.
Quality assurance is important for safeguarding the interests of consumers. However, widespread distribution of counterfeit products can ruin reputations achieved at considerable cost, a problem that can be overcome only with additional investments. For example, in food products, beverages, cosmetics, and medicines, counterfeit products can be hazardous for consumers. Indeed, field research in China suggested that despite the benefits to poor consumers of low-cost product knockoffs, they were becoming resentful that market saturation by unauthorized goods diminished the available range of legitimate goods (Maskus, et al, 1998).
A further potential benefit of strengthened intellectual-property protection is that it could induce greater R&D aimed at meeting the particular needs of developing countries. Inventive firms in developed economies tend to orient their research programs toward products and technologies for which they expect a large global demand and that may be protected through IPRS and trade secrets. This means that a disproportionately small amount of global R&D is focused on the needs of developing economies with low incomes and weak IPRS. For example, the World Health Organization (1996) claims that of the $56 billion spent globally on medical R&D in 1994, only 0.2% was aimed at pneumonia, diarrheal maladies, and tuberculosis, which together account for 18% of global illness.
It is possible that the new patent regimes introduced by TRIPS could change this situation. The total market size for pharmaceuticals of the countries that must upgrade their patent protection over the medium term is sufficiently large that, even at current shares of drugs patented elsewhere, the rise in demand could be as much as 25% of global spending (Lanjouw, 1997). Thus, the incentives generated for R&D focused on diseases of poor countries could be significant. While this is a crude calculation, it suggests that pharmaceutical firms could anticipate higher profits in developing nations, some portion of which could be devoted to research on their endemic diseases.
Nonetheless, there is considerable uncertainty about this outcome and it is possible to doubt its practical significance. Even with stronger patents (the enforcement of which would be problematic), the ability of impoverished people to buy protected treatments would not rise much for a long period of time. In this context, a strong argument for public promotion and international procurement and distribution of new drugs may be made.
4. Conclusion
Economic theory demonstrates that IPRS could play either a positive or negative role in fostering growth and development. The limited evidence available suggests that the relationship is positive but dependent on other factors that help promote benefits from intellectual property protection. In brief, IPRS could be effective and market-based mechanisms for overcoming problems that exist in markets for information creation and dissemination. However, their existence could pose problems in terms of their potential for costs and anticompetitive abuse.
Accordingly, modern IPRS systems are not sufficient by themselves to encourage effective technology transition. Instead, they must form part of a coherent and broad set of complementary policies that maximize the potential for IPRS to raise dynamic competition. Such policies include strengthening human capital and skill acquisition, promoting flexibility in enterprise organization, ensuring a strong degree of competition on domestic markets, and developing a transparent, non-discriminatory, and effective competition regime.
Source:
http://www.legalservicesindia.com/article/article/economic-benefits-of-intellectual-property-rights-2550-1.html#.WkXpZya9rCI.facebook
1. Introduction
The question of how Intellectual Property Rights affect the processes of economic development and its growth is complex and based on multiple variables. In theory stronger systems for the protection of intellectual property could either enhance or limit economic growth. Nevertheless, evidence is emerging that stronger and more certain intellectual property law could well increase the economic growth and foster beneficial change, thereby improving developmental prospects, if they are structured in a manner that promotes effective and dynamic competition.
As the global protection regime strengthens due to TRIPS, numerous questions arise about the impact on prospects of economic growth. For a lot of reasons, it is not possible to confidently say that the new regime will raise economic growth and improve development process. There are two major reasons. First, many variables affect the growth in ways that can dominate the impact of TRIPS. Second, economic theory points out that intellectual property rights could have a lot of effects on growth, some positive and some negative.
With this background the paper addresses how Intellectual Property Rights may improve economic development.
2. Economic Development and Intellectual Property Rights
Economic analysis of Intellectual Property Rights is utilitarian, questioning whether the benefits of any system outweigh its costs, both in static and dynamic terms. The anticipated benefits and costs depend on characteristics of markets, products and social institutions.
2a. The Purposes and Mechanisms of Intellectual Property Rights
There are two main economic objectives of any system of intellectual property protection. The first is to promote investments in knowledge creation and business innovation by establishing exclusive rights to use and sell newly developed technologies, goods and services. Not providing such rights would lead to economically valuable information could be appropriated without compensation by competitive rivals; hence institutions and individuals would be reluctant to invest money and effort into research and commercialisation activities. The second goal is to promote widespread dissemination of new knowledge by encouraging or requiring rights holders to place their inventions and ideas on the market. Economically, it is efficient to provide wide access to new technologies and products, once they are developed, at marginal costs production. Such costs would be quite low as it might entail simply copying a blueprint or making another copy of a storage medium.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between these objectives. An overly protective system of IPRS could limit the social gains from invention by reducing incentives to disseminate its fruits. However, an excessively weak system could reduce innovation by failing to provide an adequate return on investment. Thus, a policy balance needs to be found that is appropriate to market conditions and conducive to growth.
Different forms of IPRS operate in distinct fashions and it is misleading to group them together. Therefore, it is helpful to mention briefly what the various mechanisms are. First, patents provide the right to prevent for 20 years the unauthorized making, selling, importing, or using of a product or technology that is recognized in the patent claim and that must demonstrate novelty and industrial utility. Related devices are utility models, or petty patents, which provide exclusive rights for a shorter period for incremental inventions, and industrial designs. In most countries patent applications are made public after a prescribed time period. Thus, patents establish a protected market advantage in return for revealing technical knowledge. Several aspects of patent scope affect the effective strength of protection.
Trademarks protect rights to market goods and services under identified names and symbols. Trademarks and brand names must be sufficiently unique to avoid confusing consumers, thereby playing the important role of reducing consumer search costs. These rights encourage firms to invest in name recognition and product quality. They also induce licensees to protect the value of assets by selling goods of guaranteed quality levels. If trademarks were not protected, rival firms could pass off their lower-quality goods as legitimate versions of those produced by recognized companies. This situation would diminish incentives for maintaining quality and would raise consumer search costs. Economists generally believe that the danger of market dominance through abuse of trademarks is slight in competitive economies but such marks could be accompanied by significant market power in countries with other barriers to entry.
Firms develop some technologies that might not be patentable, might not be worth the cost of applying for a patent, or might be more valuable if kept undisclosed. They prefer to keep knowledge of such processes proprietary as trade secrets, or undisclosed information. Trade secrets are protected by legal rules against learning by rivals through dishonest means. Such protection lapses if the technologies are discovered by fair means, such as independent invention or reverse engineering. Protecting trade secrets is beneficial to the extent it encourages the development and commercial use of sub-patentable inventions. Rules protecting trade secrets thus promote adaptive innovation and encourage learning through legal means.
Literary and artistic creations and computer software are protected by copyrights, which provide exclusive rights for some period to copy and sell particular expressions of ideas after they are fixed in some medium. Related IPRS include neighboring rights of performers and broadcasters, moral rights of original artists, and copyrights for derivative products. Like patents, copyrights are limited in scope for various purposes of public policy. The most significant limitation is the fair-use doctrine, under which it is lawful to make limited numbers of copies for research and educational purposes.
Several technologies do not fit comfortably into these traditional categories of protection. Because computer programs may contain elements of industrial utility in addition to their expressive elements, some countries make programs eligible for patents. The designs of integrated circuits typically are awarded exclusive rights for shorter time periods than patents, recognizing that semiconductor designs often embody elements of expression and that technology changes quickly in that industry. Electronic transmissions of internet materials, broadcasts, and databases may not be adequately protected by standard copyrights and two recent treaties reached in the World Intellectual Property Organization call for stronger protection in certain dimensions (WTO, 1998).
Particularly controversial, especially in developing nations, are patents for biotechnological inventions and plant breeders’ rights. It could be argued that patents generate strong and unwarranted protection in the biotechnology industry, because such inventions may not embody a truly inventive step. However, representatives of biotechnology firms claim that patents are required to encourage investment in these risky technologies. There are significant concerns that providing exclusive rights in seed varieties without significant limitations for farmers’ use and competitive research could raise costs in agriculture and reduce biodiversity over time.
A final element of an intellectual property system is its enforcement. Such enforcement entails two opposing tasks: punishing infringement by free riders and disciplining enterprises that try to extend their rights beyond intended levels by acting in an anti-competitive manner. These objectives require the development of extensive legal and scientific expertise.
3. Economic Benefits of Intellectual Property Rights
Consider now the opposite direction of causation. Economists recognize several channels through which IPRS could stimulate economic development and growth. These processes are interdependent and it is appropriate to adopt a comprehensive view of the incentives associated with intellectual property protection.
Intellectual property rights could play a significant role in encouraging innovation, product development, and technical change. Developing countries tend to have IPRS systems that favor information diffusion through low-cost imitation of foreign products and technologies. To become competitive, enterprises in developing countries typically must adopt new management and organizational systems and techniques for quality control, which can markedly raise productivity. Such investments are costly but tend to have high social returns because they are crucial for raising productivity toward global norms (Evenson and Westphal, 1995). They are more likely to be undertaken in an environment where risks of unfair competition and trademark infringement are small. Moreover, IPRS could help reward creativity and risk-taking among new enterprises and entrepreneurs. Countries that retain weak standards could remain dependent on dynamically inefficient firms that rely on counterfeiting and imitation.
An example of this process is that protection for utility models has been shown to improve productivity in countries with lagging technologies. In Brazil, utility models helped domestic producers gain a significant share of the farm-machinery market by encouraging adaptation of foreign technologies to local conditions (Dahab, 1986). Utility models in the Philippines encouraged successful adaptive invention of rice threshers (Mikkelsen, 1984).
Maskus and McDaniel (1999) considered how the Japanese patent system (JPS) affected postwar Japanese technical progress, as measured by increases in total factor productivity (TFP). The JPS in place over the estimation period 1960-1993 evidently was designed to encourage incremental and adaptive innovation and diffusion of technical knowledge into the economy. Mechanisms for promoting these processes included early disclosure of, and opposition proceedings to, patent applications, an extensive system of utility models, and narrow claim requirements in patent applications. The authors found that this system encouraged large numbers of utility model applications for incremental inventions, which were based in part on laid-open prior applications for invention patents. In turn, utility models had a strongly positive impact on real TFP growth over the period, while patent applications had a weaker but still positive effect. They concluded that utility models were an important source of technical change and information diffusion in Japan, while patent applications provided both a direct and an indirect stimulus to productivity. It is interesting to note that as Japan has become a global leader in technology creation, its patent system has shifted away from encouraging diffusion and more toward protecting fundamental technologies.
Recent studies suggest that innovation through product development and entry of new firms is motivated in part by trademark protection, even in poor nations. A survey of trademark use in Lebanon provided evidence on this point (Maskus, 1997). Lebanon has an extensive set of intellectual-property laws but they are weakly enforced. Firms in the apparel industry claimed to have a strong interest in designing apparel of high quality and style aimed at Middle Eastern markets. Such efforts have been frustrated by trademark infringement in Lebanon and in neighboring countries. Thus, local product development and establishment of new firms have been stifled by trademark infringement targeted largely at domestic enterprises.
Similar problems exist in China, as found in a second survey (Maskus, et al, 1998). While the information was anecdotal, it suggested that trademark infringement negatively affected innovative Chinese enterprises. Many examples were cited of difficulties facing Chinese producers of consumer goods, such as soft drinks, processed foods, and clothing. The establishment of brand recognition in China requires costly investments in marketing and distribution channels. Enterprises that achieved this status quickly found their trademarks applied to counterfeit products. Such products were of lower quality and damaged the reputation of the legitimate enterprise. Furthermore, this problem was difficult to overcome and, in some cases, forced enterprises to close down or abandon their trademarks. According to survey respondents, this situation had a deterrent effect on enterprise development and effectively prevented interregional marketing. In turn, enterprises were less able to achieve economies of scale. Chinese trademark infringement was concentrated on products with low capital requirements and high labor intensity. These are sectors in which China has strong comparative advantages. On this evidence, the authors concluded that trademark violations may be particularly damaging to enterprise development in poor nations.
Similar comments apply to copyrights. Copyright industries, such as publishing, entertainment, and software, are likely to be dominated by foreign enterprises (which can absorb temporary losses and afford the costs of deterring infringement) and pirate firms in countries with weak protection and enforcement. Thus, lower-quality copies would be widely available but the economy’s domestic cultural and technological development would be hampered. This situation was clear in the Lebanese survey. Lebanon has a small but vibrant film and television industry that could successfully export to neighboring economies if those countries engineered stronger copyright protection. In China, the domestic software industry has grown rapidly in the area of particular business applications, which did not suffer extensive unauthorized copying, but has faced obstacles in developing larger and more fundamental programs. Thus, domestic commercial interests in stronger copyrights have emerged and are now playing a role in promoting enforcement.
Intellectual property rights also could stimulate acquisition and dissemination of new information. Patent claims are published, allowing rival firms to use the information in them to develop further inventions. This learning process takes place in 10 to 12 months in the United States (Mansfield, 1985). Knowledge formation is cumulative and as new inventions build on past practices the process of technical change could accelerate (Scotchmer, 1991). Patents, trademarks, and trade secrets also afford firms greater certainty that they face limited threats of uncompensated appropriation. This certainty could induce them to trade and license their technologies and products more readily, enhancing their diffusion into the economy.
In strengthening their IPRS regimes, either unilaterally or through adherence to TRIPS, developing countries hope to attract greater inflows of technology. There are three interdependent channels through which technology is transferred across borders. These channels are international trade in goods, foreign direct investment (FDI) within multinational enterprises, and contractual licensing of technologies and trademarks to unaffiliated firms, subsidiaries, and joint ventures. Economic theory finds that technology transfers through each channel depend in part on local protection of IPRS, albeit in complex and subtle ways.
There are important practical implications of this analysis. First, countries with weak IPRS could be isolated from modern technologies and would be forced to develop technological knowledge from their own resources, a difficult and costly task. Second, those countries would obtain fewer spillover benefits and demonstration effects of new technologies in their economies. Third, technologies available to such nations would tend to be outdated. Finally, nations with weak IPRS would experience both limited incentives for domestic innovation and relatively few inward technology transfers.
Recent survey evidence from China supported these arguments (Maskus, et al, 1998). When interviewed, managers of many foreign enterprises expressed reluctance to locate R&D facilities in China, citing fear of misappropriation and patent infringement. Nearly all reported that their enterprises transferred technologies that were at least five years behind global standards, unless other means could be found to protect them, or brought in technologies that would be obsolete in a short time. Note that the importation of lagging technologies is not necessarily inappropriate for China’s cost conditions and such knowledge could help encourage follow-on innovation. However, as China moves toward best practices in technology the problem could become more restraining. Moreover, concerns about weak IPRS discouraged foreign enterprises from fully integrating their Chinese operations. Instead they tended to divide production processes among facilities in order to avoid revealing the full nature of their technologies in any one location.
Indeed, IPRS should encourage the development of interregional and international distribution and marketing networks that are critical for achieving economies of scale. Weak IPRS could limit incentives for such investments because rights owners would be unable to prevent their marketing outlets from debasing the quality of their products, nor could they readily deter counterfeiting of their trademarks. Thus, IPRS should permit effective monitoring and enforcement of activities throughout supply and distribution chains, providing both innovators and distributors an incentive to invest in marketing, service, and quality guarantees.
Quality assurance is important for safeguarding the interests of consumers. However, widespread distribution of counterfeit products can ruin reputations achieved at considerable cost, a problem that can be overcome only with additional investments. For example, in food products, beverages, cosmetics, and medicines, counterfeit products can be hazardous for consumers. Indeed, field research in China suggested that despite the benefits to poor consumers of low-cost product knockoffs, they were becoming resentful that market saturation by unauthorized goods diminished the available range of legitimate goods (Maskus, et al, 1998).
A further potential benefit of strengthened intellectual-property protection is that it could induce greater R&D aimed at meeting the particular needs of developing countries. Inventive firms in developed economies tend to orient their research programs toward products and technologies for which they expect a large global demand and that may be protected through IPRS and trade secrets. This means that a disproportionately small amount of global R&D is focused on the needs of developing economies with low incomes and weak IPRS. For example, the World Health Organization (1996) claims that of the $56 billion spent globally on medical R&D in 1994, only 0.2% was aimed at pneumonia, diarrheal maladies, and tuberculosis, which together account for 18% of global illness.
It is possible that the new patent regimes introduced by TRIPS could change this situation. The total market size for pharmaceuticals of the countries that must upgrade their patent protection over the medium term is sufficiently large that, even at current shares of drugs patented elsewhere, the rise in demand could be as much as 25% of global spending (Lanjouw, 1997). Thus, the incentives generated for R&D focused on diseases of poor countries could be significant. While this is a crude calculation, it suggests that pharmaceutical firms could anticipate higher profits in developing nations, some portion of which could be devoted to research on their endemic diseases.
Nonetheless, there is considerable uncertainty about this outcome and it is possible to doubt its practical significance. Even with stronger patents (the enforcement of which would be problematic), the ability of impoverished people to buy protected treatments would not rise much for a long period of time. In this context, a strong argument for public promotion and international procurement and distribution of new drugs may be made.
4. Conclusion
Economic theory demonstrates that IPRS could play either a positive or negative role in fostering growth and development. The limited evidence available suggests that the relationship is positive but dependent on other factors that help promote benefits from intellectual property protection. In brief, IPRS could be effective and market-based mechanisms for overcoming problems that exist in markets for information creation and dissemination. However, their existence could pose problems in terms of their potential for costs and anticompetitive abuse.
Accordingly, modern IPRS systems are not sufficient by themselves to encourage effective technology transition. Instead, they must form part of a coherent and broad set of complementary policies that maximize the potential for IPRS to raise dynamic competition. Such policies include strengthening human capital and skill acquisition, promoting flexibility in enterprise organization, ensuring a strong degree of competition on domestic markets, and developing a transparent, non-discriminatory, and effective competition regime.
Source:
http://www.legalservicesindia.com/article/article/economic-benefits-of-intellectual-property-rights-2550-1.html#.WkXpZya9rCI.facebook
6 Startup Strategies That Turn Off Most Investors
By: MartinZwilling
Don’t bash the competition. Every investor knows how vulnerable a new startup is to competitors, so investors always ask about your sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. How an entrepreneur answers this question speaks volumes about their knowledge of business realities, customers, confidence, and their ability to handle investor funding.
There is no perfect answer to the competitive advantage question, but investors are looking for how your offering will keep ahead of competition, not just at this moment, but throughout the life of their three to five-year investment. They are also seeking to find out how you handle one of the many tough questions that a new founder will get in today’s market.
A strong answer should be something like “Our product introduces a new lower-cost technology, which we have patented and trademarked, that makes us very attractive today, and will provide a wealth of additional products as we move forward.” That says you are competitive today, have a real barrier to entry, and the potential to remain ahead of the competition for a long time.
Based on my own experience as an angel investor, and feedback I get from many other investors, here are a collection of answers that we often hear instead, from the least credible to at least reasonable:
1. Insist you have no competitors. Leading with this answer will likely terminate any further investment opportunity with this investor. He or she will assume your comment means there is no market for your product or service, or you haven’t looked. Neither speaks well for you or your startup. Even if you hedge by saying no direct competitors, we all know that existing cars are still big competition to your new flying automobile.
2. Claim the first mover advantage. This is one of the most frequent responses I hear, and is rarely convincing. The problem is that startups have limited resources to keep them ahead of big companies. If your early traction highlights an opportunity they have missed, they can mobilize their huge resources and run over you. First mover advantages are only sustainable by large companies, or founders with deep pockets.
3. Proclaim your solution as a paradigm shift. If you insist that your technology is so new and unique that it will disrupt your competitors and the whole market, investors will fear that neither they nor you can afford the time and marketing required to weather the change. They will likely decline on the basis that historically, pioneers get all the arrows.
4. Highlight your world-class team as the secret sauce. Insisting that your team is better than any other, giving you a sustainable competitive advantage for the long term, will likely come across as naiveté or arrogance. Investors know that no startup has a lock on the best people and processes, and investors don’t deal with unrealistic founders.
5. Declare that you will offer the product or service free. Free is a dirty word to investors, since they need a return on their investment. Perhaps you intend to collect money from advertisers, but this requires a large investment to get the audience you need before monetization can work. Facebook spent over $150 million before revenue.
6. Intellectual property as barrier to entry. I like patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, so this answer is a better sustainable competitive advantage than the other five answers. Now all you have to do is defend your position, and we all know that patents can break a startup in court battles, and will have alternative implementations if the price is right.
Thus, there is no perfect answer to this question, so the best entrepreneurs see it as an opportunity to highlight their own advantages, rather than put down a competitor. Being negative is never the answer. For example, it’s tempting to say that your worst competitor has poor quality products, requiring costly maintenance, but it’s much better to say that you provide a five-year free warranty that no competitor can match.
After highlighting your best competitive features and your intellectual property barriers to entry, I encourage you to put on your humble face, and proclaim your determination to never stop improving your products and processes to out-distance competitors. You want investors to believe that you are a realist, but have the confidence and determination to win.
Investors know that winning in today’s highly competitive environment is more a mindset than a product feature. Competitor bashing is not a skill that you need to hone. I look for entrepreneurs that can sell themselves and their offering to discerning customers. Money from customers and investors is the same color.
Source:
http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/2015/08/6-startup-strategies-that-turn-off-most.html
Don’t bash the competition. Every investor knows how vulnerable a new startup is to competitors, so investors always ask about your sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. How an entrepreneur answers this question speaks volumes about their knowledge of business realities, customers, confidence, and their ability to handle investor funding.
There is no perfect answer to the competitive advantage question, but investors are looking for how your offering will keep ahead of competition, not just at this moment, but throughout the life of their three to five-year investment. They are also seeking to find out how you handle one of the many tough questions that a new founder will get in today’s market.
A strong answer should be something like “Our product introduces a new lower-cost technology, which we have patented and trademarked, that makes us very attractive today, and will provide a wealth of additional products as we move forward.” That says you are competitive today, have a real barrier to entry, and the potential to remain ahead of the competition for a long time.
Based on my own experience as an angel investor, and feedback I get from many other investors, here are a collection of answers that we often hear instead, from the least credible to at least reasonable:
1. Insist you have no competitors. Leading with this answer will likely terminate any further investment opportunity with this investor. He or she will assume your comment means there is no market for your product or service, or you haven’t looked. Neither speaks well for you or your startup. Even if you hedge by saying no direct competitors, we all know that existing cars are still big competition to your new flying automobile.
2. Claim the first mover advantage. This is one of the most frequent responses I hear, and is rarely convincing. The problem is that startups have limited resources to keep them ahead of big companies. If your early traction highlights an opportunity they have missed, they can mobilize their huge resources and run over you. First mover advantages are only sustainable by large companies, or founders with deep pockets.
3. Proclaim your solution as a paradigm shift. If you insist that your technology is so new and unique that it will disrupt your competitors and the whole market, investors will fear that neither they nor you can afford the time and marketing required to weather the change. They will likely decline on the basis that historically, pioneers get all the arrows.
4. Highlight your world-class team as the secret sauce. Insisting that your team is better than any other, giving you a sustainable competitive advantage for the long term, will likely come across as naiveté or arrogance. Investors know that no startup has a lock on the best people and processes, and investors don’t deal with unrealistic founders.
5. Declare that you will offer the product or service free. Free is a dirty word to investors, since they need a return on their investment. Perhaps you intend to collect money from advertisers, but this requires a large investment to get the audience you need before monetization can work. Facebook spent over $150 million before revenue.
6. Intellectual property as barrier to entry. I like patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, so this answer is a better sustainable competitive advantage than the other five answers. Now all you have to do is defend your position, and we all know that patents can break a startup in court battles, and will have alternative implementations if the price is right.
Thus, there is no perfect answer to this question, so the best entrepreneurs see it as an opportunity to highlight their own advantages, rather than put down a competitor. Being negative is never the answer. For example, it’s tempting to say that your worst competitor has poor quality products, requiring costly maintenance, but it’s much better to say that you provide a five-year free warranty that no competitor can match.
After highlighting your best competitive features and your intellectual property barriers to entry, I encourage you to put on your humble face, and proclaim your determination to never stop improving your products and processes to out-distance competitors. You want investors to believe that you are a realist, but have the confidence and determination to win.
Investors know that winning in today’s highly competitive environment is more a mindset than a product feature. Competitor bashing is not a skill that you need to hone. I look for entrepreneurs that can sell themselves and their offering to discerning customers. Money from customers and investors is the same color.
Source:
http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/2015/08/6-startup-strategies-that-turn-off-most.html
5 Clean Water Startups Emerging in Israel
By: Eze Vidra
There is no human need more basic than water. We simply can’t survive without it. I talked about Charity:Water in a previous post, but today my focus is on agtech.
This week water has been on my mind for several reasons. One is the sale of Israel’s Netafim, the company that invented drip irrigation, to Mexichem for $1.5 billion. Netafim’s technology essentially enables farmers to “grow more with less,” increasing yields and improving crop production while preserving quality and quantity of water and soil fertility. The story of Netafim is profiled in the Coller Venture Review issue on deep innovation.The second reason is connected to Philanthropy. Jeff Bezos asked the world how he should donate his money on Twitter. He got more than 46,000 responses, but that created a new problem: how can he sift through all the answers, create themes and understand which ones would be most impactful.
That’s where AI came into the picture in the form of Unanimous.ai, a startup specializing in a form of advanced decision making called swarm intelligence, which essentially emulates the behavior of a bee swarm to come up with the most complete community decision. Bottom line is, after a rigorous process which included human evaluators ranking 6 choices at a time, a winner was clearly chosen. You guessed it: Universal Access to Clean Water topped the list.
Israel is a hotbed for agtech in general, and water tech more specifically. It came from a necessity: a small country with limited fresh water supply, Israel needed to figure out how to desalinate water, save water, and irrigate the desert. Netafim started in a Kibbutz in the 1960s, but to this day, there are approximately 130 startups operating in the water space in Israel alone, and it’s a buzzing space. There’s even a dedicated Water Tech conference.
You can find the full list on Startup Nation Central, but here are a few select Israeli agtech startups in the water space:
WaterGen
WaterGen’s cutting-edge technology provides an abundant, renewable source of fresh and clean drinking water by extracting it directly from the air. With the patented GENius, the world’s most energy-efficient atmospheric water generator (AWG) module of its kind, Water-Gen’s various water-from-air generator models can serve the clean drinking water needs from a small house to whole villages to an entire country.
Utilis
Utilis technology is based on the analysis of multi-spectral, aerial images that capture the area of a suspected leak. By processing these images and applying algorithms, the system uses essential physical parameters, such as geological, meteorological, and hydrological factors. After calculating and adjusting for any distorting factors, the information is intersected with piping infrastructure layouts to indicate the location of underground water leaks.
TaKaDu
TaKaDu’s patented technology uses raw data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to detect and manage the full life-cycle of network events, including leaks, bursts, and faulty assets.
Based on big data analytics and sophisticated algorithms, TaKaDu’s IoT cloud-based solution helps water utilities detect problems early, reduce water loss, shorten repair cycles, and improve customer service.
Indegy
Indegy provides visibility and security for industrial control networks. The platform delivers comprehensive visibility and oversight into all OT activities, including changes to controller logic, configuration, and state.
Desalitech
Desalitech is a provider of high-recovery water production and effluent treatment solutions. The company’s ReFlex reverse osmosis (RO) systems offer maximum recovery and feature Desalitech’s patented closed-circuit desalination (CCD) process.
CCD represents an improvement in RO water treatment by achieving efficient use of water resources, reduced emission of brine waste, increased flexibility and reliability, and lower power consumption, all using standard, off-the-shelf RO components.
Source:
https://tech.co/5-clean-water-startups-emerging-israel-2017-12
There is no human need more basic than water. We simply can’t survive without it. I talked about Charity:Water in a previous post, but today my focus is on agtech.
This week water has been on my mind for several reasons. One is the sale of Israel’s Netafim, the company that invented drip irrigation, to Mexichem for $1.5 billion. Netafim’s technology essentially enables farmers to “grow more with less,” increasing yields and improving crop production while preserving quality and quantity of water and soil fertility. The story of Netafim is profiled in the Coller Venture Review issue on deep innovation.The second reason is connected to Philanthropy. Jeff Bezos asked the world how he should donate his money on Twitter. He got more than 46,000 responses, but that created a new problem: how can he sift through all the answers, create themes and understand which ones would be most impactful.
That’s where AI came into the picture in the form of Unanimous.ai, a startup specializing in a form of advanced decision making called swarm intelligence, which essentially emulates the behavior of a bee swarm to come up with the most complete community decision. Bottom line is, after a rigorous process which included human evaluators ranking 6 choices at a time, a winner was clearly chosen. You guessed it: Universal Access to Clean Water topped the list.
Israel is a hotbed for agtech in general, and water tech more specifically. It came from a necessity: a small country with limited fresh water supply, Israel needed to figure out how to desalinate water, save water, and irrigate the desert. Netafim started in a Kibbutz in the 1960s, but to this day, there are approximately 130 startups operating in the water space in Israel alone, and it’s a buzzing space. There’s even a dedicated Water Tech conference.
You can find the full list on Startup Nation Central, but here are a few select Israeli agtech startups in the water space:
WaterGen
WaterGen’s cutting-edge technology provides an abundant, renewable source of fresh and clean drinking water by extracting it directly from the air. With the patented GENius, the world’s most energy-efficient atmospheric water generator (AWG) module of its kind, Water-Gen’s various water-from-air generator models can serve the clean drinking water needs from a small house to whole villages to an entire country.
Utilis
Utilis technology is based on the analysis of multi-spectral, aerial images that capture the area of a suspected leak. By processing these images and applying algorithms, the system uses essential physical parameters, such as geological, meteorological, and hydrological factors. After calculating and adjusting for any distorting factors, the information is intersected with piping infrastructure layouts to indicate the location of underground water leaks.
TaKaDu
TaKaDu’s patented technology uses raw data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to detect and manage the full life-cycle of network events, including leaks, bursts, and faulty assets.
Based on big data analytics and sophisticated algorithms, TaKaDu’s IoT cloud-based solution helps water utilities detect problems early, reduce water loss, shorten repair cycles, and improve customer service.
Indegy
Indegy provides visibility and security for industrial control networks. The platform delivers comprehensive visibility and oversight into all OT activities, including changes to controller logic, configuration, and state.
Desalitech
Desalitech is a provider of high-recovery water production and effluent treatment solutions. The company’s ReFlex reverse osmosis (RO) systems offer maximum recovery and feature Desalitech’s patented closed-circuit desalination (CCD) process.
CCD represents an improvement in RO water treatment by achieving efficient use of water resources, reduced emission of brine waste, increased flexibility and reliability, and lower power consumption, all using standard, off-the-shelf RO components.
Source:
https://tech.co/5-clean-water-startups-emerging-israel-2017-12
How Big Companies Use Licensing to Fund Startups
By: Administrator
When it comes to developing new technologies, many large companies are finding creative ways of using licensing to partner with startups with promising new technologies.
One of the biggest banks in North America is now in the startup funding game. TD Bank Group created a $3 million plus investment fund to provide patent application funding for startups in the fintech space.
The goal is to help startups with one of their biggest and most important expenses – protecting their valuable IP. It’s non-equity based funding and gives the bank relationships with early stage startups. In return TD bank gets a non-exclusive license to the patent. If the technology proves out, the bank offers larger rounds of funding.
The upside for the bank is rights to use the latest in fintech to build their business. The upside for the startup is a big licensing partner to launch their IP into the market as soon as it’s ready.
IP plays a critical role in today’s startups. According to a recent study by the US Patent and Trademark Office, startups with patents are more successful than those without. The study found that a patent increases a startups chance’s of receiving investor funding by over 50%. Startups with patents also created more jobs, had higher sales revenues, were more innovative, and were more likely to go public or be acquired.
For many startups today, a corporate venture fund (CVF) offer a better route to go. Unlike institutional or private VC’s, which are short-term focused on financial returns, CVF’s like TD Bank, invest for longer term strategic reasons. CVF’s are also less hands on, giving the startup more control over their company and IP development. In return, the CVF offers several exit opportunities, including licensing, OEM partnerships, new sales channels, or an acquisition.
CVF’s are growing because startups are playing a critical role in developing innovation. According to a report from the NSF, R&D spending by startups and small businesses increased from just over 4 percent in 1981 to about 24 percent in 2009 (NSF 2012). A big reason for investment by corporations is it’s a faster way for finding complementary products and services, acquiring new disruptive technologies, or finding new market opportunities.
Companies such as Google, J&J, Qualcomm, Comcast, Dell, Microsoft, Nokia and Intel all have a CVF. Not only do these funds invest significant capital, they also offer other resources such as access to corporate labs, skilled R&D personnel, marketing, sales, manufacturing and regulatory know-how, which accelerates a startups’ innovation activities. In certain industries, such as life sciences, where there’s lot’s of development risk, high capital investment amounts, and longer time to market, big corporations make the investments to encourage new innovation development in their industry.
This is the approach GE Ventures uses. They invest in startups with technology in areas of health care, manufacturing, software, energy, and even IP that improves their internal productivity and efficiency. The company offers several investment options including equity, joint business ventures, and licensing. Plus they offer access to other resources such as labs, technical expertise, and even partners and customers to help a startup scale up revenues.
Rather than going head to head with big competitors, consider partnering with them to fund your startup. Not only can CVF’s be a great source of capital, they can also be a great licensing or strategic alliance partner, providing key resources to help accelerate your time to market. Click here, here and here to read more about CVF’s.
Source:
http://www.medtechdirectory.com/blog/540-How-Big-Companies-Use-Licensing-to-Fund-Startups.html
When it comes to developing new technologies, many large companies are finding creative ways of using licensing to partner with startups with promising new technologies.
One of the biggest banks in North America is now in the startup funding game. TD Bank Group created a $3 million plus investment fund to provide patent application funding for startups in the fintech space.
The goal is to help startups with one of their biggest and most important expenses – protecting their valuable IP. It’s non-equity based funding and gives the bank relationships with early stage startups. In return TD bank gets a non-exclusive license to the patent. If the technology proves out, the bank offers larger rounds of funding.
The upside for the bank is rights to use the latest in fintech to build their business. The upside for the startup is a big licensing partner to launch their IP into the market as soon as it’s ready.
IP plays a critical role in today’s startups. According to a recent study by the US Patent and Trademark Office, startups with patents are more successful than those without. The study found that a patent increases a startups chance’s of receiving investor funding by over 50%. Startups with patents also created more jobs, had higher sales revenues, were more innovative, and were more likely to go public or be acquired.
For many startups today, a corporate venture fund (CVF) offer a better route to go. Unlike institutional or private VC’s, which are short-term focused on financial returns, CVF’s like TD Bank, invest for longer term strategic reasons. CVF’s are also less hands on, giving the startup more control over their company and IP development. In return, the CVF offers several exit opportunities, including licensing, OEM partnerships, new sales channels, or an acquisition.
CVF’s are growing because startups are playing a critical role in developing innovation. According to a report from the NSF, R&D spending by startups and small businesses increased from just over 4 percent in 1981 to about 24 percent in 2009 (NSF 2012). A big reason for investment by corporations is it’s a faster way for finding complementary products and services, acquiring new disruptive technologies, or finding new market opportunities.
Companies such as Google, J&J, Qualcomm, Comcast, Dell, Microsoft, Nokia and Intel all have a CVF. Not only do these funds invest significant capital, they also offer other resources such as access to corporate labs, skilled R&D personnel, marketing, sales, manufacturing and regulatory know-how, which accelerates a startups’ innovation activities. In certain industries, such as life sciences, where there’s lot’s of development risk, high capital investment amounts, and longer time to market, big corporations make the investments to encourage new innovation development in their industry.
This is the approach GE Ventures uses. They invest in startups with technology in areas of health care, manufacturing, software, energy, and even IP that improves their internal productivity and efficiency. The company offers several investment options including equity, joint business ventures, and licensing. Plus they offer access to other resources such as labs, technical expertise, and even partners and customers to help a startup scale up revenues.
Rather than going head to head with big competitors, consider partnering with them to fund your startup. Not only can CVF’s be a great source of capital, they can also be a great licensing or strategic alliance partner, providing key resources to help accelerate your time to market. Click here, here and here to read more about CVF’s.
Source:
http://www.medtechdirectory.com/blog/540-How-Big-Companies-Use-Licensing-to-Fund-Startups.html
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
By: articlesly
Over the course of humanity, every discovery has yielded more questions as we continue to explore new territory. As we continue to explore the frontier known as cyberspace, and discover new ways to use the medium, we are opened up to more ethical dilemmas and questions. Intellectual property has always been a thorny issue. The internet however raises new problems for businesses and individuals seeking to protect their intellectual property. With the easy access to information, protecting your IP is a virtual minefield.
What is Intellectual Property? Intellectual property (IP) is subject matter that is a product of the intellect or mind. The term however, actually reflects the legal entitlements that are attached to intangible ideas, concepts, and certain types of information in their expressed form. In example, a book or movie is the expression of creative and artistic work and intellectual property that would provide the copyright holder exclusive rights for a period of time to control the reproduction and adaptation of that work. Copyrights, patents, trademarks and industrial designs are all examples of intangible subject matter. An often overlooked intangible is trade secrets. Trade secrets can be protected under Intellectual Property.
Intellectual Property is a valuable business asset which can be leveraged in the marketplace to as a competitive advantage. An IP audit can help you to determine what hidden assets you may have in your business. Many firms will send you an IP audit checklist which has a series of questions designed to impossible valuable business assets. Once you have uncoovered your IP, you should take steps to protect it.
Ensure that you own the rights. In today's world, many businesses outsource functions which are not their core competency. Paying to have something created does not grant you ownership. You may have paid an outside contractor to develop a sophisticated software program, or a graphic designer to revamp your logo or even a writer to develop your marketing contractual. When hiring outside firms to create something for you, you should always use a Work for Hire Agreement. Standard agreements are widely available. A Work for Hire Agreement basically transfers all rights from the creator to the payer.
Do not forget your employees. Many organizations have their employees sign employment contracts which stipulate that any work created for the company belongs to the company. It is similar to a work for hire agreement with independent contractors in that the rights belong to the organization and not the individual. You are paying the employees to create the work on your behalf.
Protect yourventions. If you have invented a business method, process or other patentable invention you need to take steps to protect it. It is advisable to refuse from selling a patentable invention until you have taken the necessary steps to protect your rights. Filing a patent application is expensive and is something that should be done by an attorney specializing in patent law. If you are a new business, there are interim steps that you can take that will offer you protection until you have the cash to file the patent application. File an Invention Disclosure Document. This document can be purchased for about $ 10.00 and when filed with the United States Patents & Trademarks Office will protect some of your rights for approximately two years. You can also document your invention in an invention diary or something similar and mail it to yourself via the United States Postal Service. It is important to use the US mail system rather than an outside carrier such as FedEx, or DHL. The post office is a federal agency and will be accepted by the Patents and Trademarks Office. Once you receive the package, do not open it – store it in a safe place until you are ready to take the next steps.
Notify others of your rights. If you have created written works or other information which falls within copyright laws, use the copyright symbol, which is the C within a circle. This can be followed by the year the work was created and your organization's name. An R within a circle indicates a registered trademark and should not be used unless you have in fact registered the item (ie logos, brand name). However, you can use TM (trademark) or SM (service mark) next to your name or logo. This will deter others from stealing your work. Additionally, if your internal or external contractors are creating software for you, have them embed footprints in the code to protect you in the event that someone steals your software. The footprints are identifiable information that can be used to prove that you created the software.
While you want to share your IP with the public to drive business, it is equally important to take the necessary steps to protect this valuable asset.
Source:
https://articlesly.com/intellectual-property/
Over the course of humanity, every discovery has yielded more questions as we continue to explore new territory. As we continue to explore the frontier known as cyberspace, and discover new ways to use the medium, we are opened up to more ethical dilemmas and questions. Intellectual property has always been a thorny issue. The internet however raises new problems for businesses and individuals seeking to protect their intellectual property. With the easy access to information, protecting your IP is a virtual minefield.
What is Intellectual Property? Intellectual property (IP) is subject matter that is a product of the intellect or mind. The term however, actually reflects the legal entitlements that are attached to intangible ideas, concepts, and certain types of information in their expressed form. In example, a book or movie is the expression of creative and artistic work and intellectual property that would provide the copyright holder exclusive rights for a period of time to control the reproduction and adaptation of that work. Copyrights, patents, trademarks and industrial designs are all examples of intangible subject matter. An often overlooked intangible is trade secrets. Trade secrets can be protected under Intellectual Property.
Intellectual Property is a valuable business asset which can be leveraged in the marketplace to as a competitive advantage. An IP audit can help you to determine what hidden assets you may have in your business. Many firms will send you an IP audit checklist which has a series of questions designed to impossible valuable business assets. Once you have uncoovered your IP, you should take steps to protect it.
Ensure that you own the rights. In today's world, many businesses outsource functions which are not their core competency. Paying to have something created does not grant you ownership. You may have paid an outside contractor to develop a sophisticated software program, or a graphic designer to revamp your logo or even a writer to develop your marketing contractual. When hiring outside firms to create something for you, you should always use a Work for Hire Agreement. Standard agreements are widely available. A Work for Hire Agreement basically transfers all rights from the creator to the payer.
Do not forget your employees. Many organizations have their employees sign employment contracts which stipulate that any work created for the company belongs to the company. It is similar to a work for hire agreement with independent contractors in that the rights belong to the organization and not the individual. You are paying the employees to create the work on your behalf.
Protect yourventions. If you have invented a business method, process or other patentable invention you need to take steps to protect it. It is advisable to refuse from selling a patentable invention until you have taken the necessary steps to protect your rights. Filing a patent application is expensive and is something that should be done by an attorney specializing in patent law. If you are a new business, there are interim steps that you can take that will offer you protection until you have the cash to file the patent application. File an Invention Disclosure Document. This document can be purchased for about $ 10.00 and when filed with the United States Patents & Trademarks Office will protect some of your rights for approximately two years. You can also document your invention in an invention diary or something similar and mail it to yourself via the United States Postal Service. It is important to use the US mail system rather than an outside carrier such as FedEx, or DHL. The post office is a federal agency and will be accepted by the Patents and Trademarks Office. Once you receive the package, do not open it – store it in a safe place until you are ready to take the next steps.
Notify others of your rights. If you have created written works or other information which falls within copyright laws, use the copyright symbol, which is the C within a circle. This can be followed by the year the work was created and your organization's name. An R within a circle indicates a registered trademark and should not be used unless you have in fact registered the item (ie logos, brand name). However, you can use TM (trademark) or SM (service mark) next to your name or logo. This will deter others from stealing your work. Additionally, if your internal or external contractors are creating software for you, have them embed footprints in the code to protect you in the event that someone steals your software. The footprints are identifiable information that can be used to prove that you created the software.
While you want to share your IP with the public to drive business, it is equally important to take the necessary steps to protect this valuable asset.
Source:
https://articlesly.com/intellectual-property/
Protect Your Startup’s Intellectual Property By Avoiding These Costly Mistakes
By: MURIEL VEGA
Copyright, trademark, patents, and licensing — all words that are important knowledge for startup founders with innovative products, but ones that are often used in the wrong context. That can be dangerous, as your intellectual property, the ownership right on ideas or creations from somebody’s mind, may not be as protected as you think.
If your startup has specific branding and/or unique technologies that are essential to your product and growth, it’s time to explore options to protect your intellectual property. Adding legal counsel early on can help you skip some of the pitfalls that may stop your business on its tracks.
One of those big, easy-to-miss intellectual property pitfalls? Your company’s name, says John Lyon, a senior associate at Thomas Horstemeyer, LLP, an Atlanta-based intellectual property law firm.
“It’s easy and cheap to re-brand before you launch,” says Lyon. “Not so after. If you’ve already launched your company and then a year later, after you’ve built up a customer base and received funding, you receive a letter saying, ‘Please stop doing this under this name because I’m already using that company name and I have a federal trademark,’ — I can’t tell you how many times that’s happened.”
Lyon’s main focus is electrical/computer patent prosecution, litigation, and open source software licensing. Here, he breaks down the importance of exploring copyright issues and trade secrets as you scale your company and what you should keep in mind.
Intellectual Property concepts
Trademark: Branding falls under trademark. It can be a word, name, or symbol or any combination which is used to identify the goods or products of one company from others. For example, you know when you see the Nike ‘swoosh’ on a t-shirt, it will conform to Nike standards and quality. It’ll probably have certain designs and certain features. That’s valuable.
Copyright: Copyrights are the rights granted to creative types regarding the ability to control who can make copies of their creation or expression, whether it be art and marketing materials, written code, computer code, or music.
Patents: Government-sanctioned monopolies protecting an inventor’s rights to make use of their invention. With a patent, your invention receives 20-year protection from the government in exchange for revealing the inner working to the public.
Start by searching Google for your prospective company name
“I can’t tell you how many times someone has come up with a great company name or logo, become emotionally attached to it, and they don’t look to see if anyone else is already using that name or a similar logo,” says Lyon.
It’s cheaper to re-brand before you launch, shares Lyon. He suggests googling every prospective startup name you have in mind before landing on one and checking available trademarks.
Don’t skip the copyright, software startups
Avoiding admin costs and legal fees can become an issue down the line if you have an informal partnership in place and haven’t taken the steps to make sure your product is formally protected by copyright. While product development or launching may be at the top of your to-do list, Lyon warns founders about forgetting to copyright their intellectual property.
“Things like who owns the copyright to the code gets overlooked,” says Lyon. “You can get into an awkward situation where the startup ends up not owning the copyright for the code that forms their product.”
“It may be that a contractor or developer owns it and it was never assigned to the company because they didn’t do all the paperwork that needed to be done. Or, one of the co-founders owns the code instead of the company itself, so if you have a falling out between cofounders, the company can go under because the company doesn’t own the copyright and the code for their program or their product.”
It’s an easy fix, says Lyon. All you have to do is complete a one-page, form document assigning the copyright and the code from the developer or a co-founder to the company. You can grab this form off of Legal Zoom or via your legal counsel.
Be aware of the patent timeline
“Everyone’s aware of what patents are, but not very many people are aware of all the rules that surround patents and how you could forfeit your rights accidentally,” says Lyon.
“If you think you might want to patent this, pull up a calendar and start highlighting some critical dates here. If you want to file a patent application, you may want to wait before you start offering it for sale, or you may want to wait before you go do a demo.”
If you wait until after it goes public, you have 12 months to file a patent application. However, the lengthy process includes several steps such as finding a patent lawyer, doing a disclosure, and several rounds of edits.
Patents are not a one-time done deal
Often startup founders make the mistake of thinking that patents are a one-and-done deal. This is not true, as products are always evolving and improving.
“As their product evolves, they need to ask themselves whether or not any of those new features they’re adding might be worth trying to protect with a patent,” says Lyon.
“A lot of companies, when they’re small and growing, they may file one patent application, based off of their prototype. Two years later, they’re at version 4.0 and things have changed quite a bit. That’s something to consider so they don’t overlook things and can make sure they’re always protected.”
Source:
https://hypepotamus.com/community/intellectual-property-mistakes/
Copyright, trademark, patents, and licensing — all words that are important knowledge for startup founders with innovative products, but ones that are often used in the wrong context. That can be dangerous, as your intellectual property, the ownership right on ideas or creations from somebody’s mind, may not be as protected as you think.
If your startup has specific branding and/or unique technologies that are essential to your product and growth, it’s time to explore options to protect your intellectual property. Adding legal counsel early on can help you skip some of the pitfalls that may stop your business on its tracks.
One of those big, easy-to-miss intellectual property pitfalls? Your company’s name, says John Lyon, a senior associate at Thomas Horstemeyer, LLP, an Atlanta-based intellectual property law firm.
“It’s easy and cheap to re-brand before you launch,” says Lyon. “Not so after. If you’ve already launched your company and then a year later, after you’ve built up a customer base and received funding, you receive a letter saying, ‘Please stop doing this under this name because I’m already using that company name and I have a federal trademark,’ — I can’t tell you how many times that’s happened.”
Lyon’s main focus is electrical/computer patent prosecution, litigation, and open source software licensing. Here, he breaks down the importance of exploring copyright issues and trade secrets as you scale your company and what you should keep in mind.
Intellectual Property concepts
Trademark: Branding falls under trademark. It can be a word, name, or symbol or any combination which is used to identify the goods or products of one company from others. For example, you know when you see the Nike ‘swoosh’ on a t-shirt, it will conform to Nike standards and quality. It’ll probably have certain designs and certain features. That’s valuable.
Copyright: Copyrights are the rights granted to creative types regarding the ability to control who can make copies of their creation or expression, whether it be art and marketing materials, written code, computer code, or music.
Patents: Government-sanctioned monopolies protecting an inventor’s rights to make use of their invention. With a patent, your invention receives 20-year protection from the government in exchange for revealing the inner working to the public.
Start by searching Google for your prospective company name
“I can’t tell you how many times someone has come up with a great company name or logo, become emotionally attached to it, and they don’t look to see if anyone else is already using that name or a similar logo,” says Lyon.
It’s cheaper to re-brand before you launch, shares Lyon. He suggests googling every prospective startup name you have in mind before landing on one and checking available trademarks.
Don’t skip the copyright, software startups
Avoiding admin costs and legal fees can become an issue down the line if you have an informal partnership in place and haven’t taken the steps to make sure your product is formally protected by copyright. While product development or launching may be at the top of your to-do list, Lyon warns founders about forgetting to copyright their intellectual property.
“Things like who owns the copyright to the code gets overlooked,” says Lyon. “You can get into an awkward situation where the startup ends up not owning the copyright for the code that forms their product.”
“It may be that a contractor or developer owns it and it was never assigned to the company because they didn’t do all the paperwork that needed to be done. Or, one of the co-founders owns the code instead of the company itself, so if you have a falling out between cofounders, the company can go under because the company doesn’t own the copyright and the code for their program or their product.”
It’s an easy fix, says Lyon. All you have to do is complete a one-page, form document assigning the copyright and the code from the developer or a co-founder to the company. You can grab this form off of Legal Zoom or via your legal counsel.
Be aware of the patent timeline
“Everyone’s aware of what patents are, but not very many people are aware of all the rules that surround patents and how you could forfeit your rights accidentally,” says Lyon.
“If you think you might want to patent this, pull up a calendar and start highlighting some critical dates here. If you want to file a patent application, you may want to wait before you start offering it for sale, or you may want to wait before you go do a demo.”
If you wait until after it goes public, you have 12 months to file a patent application. However, the lengthy process includes several steps such as finding a patent lawyer, doing a disclosure, and several rounds of edits.
Patents are not a one-time done deal
Often startup founders make the mistake of thinking that patents are a one-and-done deal. This is not true, as products are always evolving and improving.
“As their product evolves, they need to ask themselves whether or not any of those new features they’re adding might be worth trying to protect with a patent,” says Lyon.
“A lot of companies, when they’re small and growing, they may file one patent application, based off of their prototype. Two years later, they’re at version 4.0 and things have changed quite a bit. That’s something to consider so they don’t overlook things and can make sure they’re always protected.”
Source:
https://hypepotamus.com/community/intellectual-property-mistakes/
Protecting Your Intellectual Property Is More Important than Ever
By: MELINDA EMERSON
When you see or hear the abbreviation “IP,” it stands for Intellectual Property. IP is a key asset in a small business. Simply put, intellectual property is the ownership of concepts, processes and ideas, as opposed to physical property which characterizes a tangible asset. IP is fast becoming the major delineator among business owners who are competing for market share and customers.
There are four basic types of IP that small businesses often rely on.
Copyrighted Material
This category encompasses everything from literary and artistic works to video and audio recordings to architectural drawings and computer code. Although a copyright is the most common form of IP, it does not cover ideas or concepts unless they are written down, creatively rendered, or recorded in some other fashion. However, you can not copyright a book title unless it’s a book series. Though technically speaking, you don’t have to register a copyright in order for it to be valid, doing so is relatively inexpensive and gives you more solid legal footing should a dispute ever arise.
Trademarks
While copyrights focus mainly on creative works, trademarks protect anything that is related to branding. Things that can be trademarked include company symbols (like McDonald’s golden arches), names (like the Super Bowl), or logos (like the blue and white F for Facebook) – as long as it is distinctive (for instance, the name “AAA Plumbing” probably couldn’t be trademarked). Trademarks can be filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a few hundred dollars or a bit more if you utilize a lawyer.
Patents
These days, patents are the least common types of IP among small business owners. That’s because patents only apply to invented products, processes, and methods which are determined to be “novel,” “non-obvious,” and “useful” according to federal statutes. Also, the patenting process with the USPTO can take months or years and cost thousands of dollars, and it always involves securing the services of a patent lawyer.
Trade Secrets
This is a more nebulous classification which covers any type of process, recipe, formula, or design that gives your business a competitive advantage (like a family secret pie recipe, your unique 3D printing process, or Coca-Cola’s secret formula). Here’s the problem: the government doesn’t provide any registration process for trade secrets (which would defeat the purpose, after all), so it’s up to the small business to restrict access to its trade secrets. Legal relief only comes if the IP is leaked or stolen (which is theft) or an employee violates a non-disclosure agreement (which is a breach of contract).
Intensely Protect Your IP
Though the process for safeguarding or registering various forms of IP can differ depending on the company and the context, here are some general guidelines for how to protect your business:
Do your homework. Identify your IP, categorize it properly, and know your rights and limitations.
Don’t procrastinate. The USPTO operates on a “first to file” system, so even if you come up with the idea first, you’re out of luck if someone else registers it with the USPTO before you do.
Seek expert advice. For complex IP types like patents and trademarks, hiring a who specializes in IP law to help you navigate the process.
Monitor your IP rights. Once you have registered your IP, it’s up to you to watch out for infringements; the government won’t do it for you.
Handle disputes wisely. If you find someone using your IP improperly, don’t automatically run to the courthouse. Consider sending a notification letter to the perpetrator; or if the revelation might actually boost your business, it may be prudent to ignore it altogether.
Overlooking your IP could have negative ramifications for your business. But don’t wait to find out you’re wrong by watching a competitor leverage your creative ideas or logo to make money for their business. When it comes to IP, Prevention is worth a pound of cure.
For more insights on running your small business, follow me on Twitter.
Source:
https://succeedasyourownboss.com/protecting-intellectual-property-important-ever/
When you see or hear the abbreviation “IP,” it stands for Intellectual Property. IP is a key asset in a small business. Simply put, intellectual property is the ownership of concepts, processes and ideas, as opposed to physical property which characterizes a tangible asset. IP is fast becoming the major delineator among business owners who are competing for market share and customers.
There are four basic types of IP that small businesses often rely on.
Copyrighted Material
This category encompasses everything from literary and artistic works to video and audio recordings to architectural drawings and computer code. Although a copyright is the most common form of IP, it does not cover ideas or concepts unless they are written down, creatively rendered, or recorded in some other fashion. However, you can not copyright a book title unless it’s a book series. Though technically speaking, you don’t have to register a copyright in order for it to be valid, doing so is relatively inexpensive and gives you more solid legal footing should a dispute ever arise.
Trademarks
While copyrights focus mainly on creative works, trademarks protect anything that is related to branding. Things that can be trademarked include company symbols (like McDonald’s golden arches), names (like the Super Bowl), or logos (like the blue and white F for Facebook) – as long as it is distinctive (for instance, the name “AAA Plumbing” probably couldn’t be trademarked). Trademarks can be filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a few hundred dollars or a bit more if you utilize a lawyer.
Patents
These days, patents are the least common types of IP among small business owners. That’s because patents only apply to invented products, processes, and methods which are determined to be “novel,” “non-obvious,” and “useful” according to federal statutes. Also, the patenting process with the USPTO can take months or years and cost thousands of dollars, and it always involves securing the services of a patent lawyer.
Trade Secrets
This is a more nebulous classification which covers any type of process, recipe, formula, or design that gives your business a competitive advantage (like a family secret pie recipe, your unique 3D printing process, or Coca-Cola’s secret formula). Here’s the problem: the government doesn’t provide any registration process for trade secrets (which would defeat the purpose, after all), so it’s up to the small business to restrict access to its trade secrets. Legal relief only comes if the IP is leaked or stolen (which is theft) or an employee violates a non-disclosure agreement (which is a breach of contract).
Intensely Protect Your IP
Though the process for safeguarding or registering various forms of IP can differ depending on the company and the context, here are some general guidelines for how to protect your business:
Do your homework. Identify your IP, categorize it properly, and know your rights and limitations.
Don’t procrastinate. The USPTO operates on a “first to file” system, so even if you come up with the idea first, you’re out of luck if someone else registers it with the USPTO before you do.
Seek expert advice. For complex IP types like patents and trademarks, hiring a who specializes in IP law to help you navigate the process.
Monitor your IP rights. Once you have registered your IP, it’s up to you to watch out for infringements; the government won’t do it for you.
Handle disputes wisely. If you find someone using your IP improperly, don’t automatically run to the courthouse. Consider sending a notification letter to the perpetrator; or if the revelation might actually boost your business, it may be prudent to ignore it altogether.
Overlooking your IP could have negative ramifications for your business. But don’t wait to find out you’re wrong by watching a competitor leverage your creative ideas or logo to make money for their business. When it comes to IP, Prevention is worth a pound of cure.
For more insights on running your small business, follow me on Twitter.
Source:
https://succeedasyourownboss.com/protecting-intellectual-property-important-ever/
The Manual for Indian Startups: a guide to documents, plans, templates and agreements
By: Madanmohan Rao
The book is authored by Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi (co-founder of Crayon Data), Meena Ganesh (CEO of Portea Medical), Alok Mittal (co-founder of Indifi), Sriram Subramanya (founder of Integra Software), and Prof. S. Sadagopan (Director of IIIT-Bangalore).
“The operating models of startup ventures in India differ from the Western models,” explains Infosys Co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan in the foreword. The book provides the Indian context in terms of compliance and documentation needs, and has been supported by CII’s Startup Council.
I have listed some of the necessary documents, plans, templates and agreements in Table 1. The book ends with a state-wise list of 64 incubators in India along with hub location and contact information (see also YourStory’s Startup Hatch profiles of accelerators and incubators).
The material is spread across 142 pages and makes for a quick read, but its real value is as a handy reference and process guide to make sure a startup is on track and does not face nasty operational surprises down the road. Related books reviewed by YourStory include Startup CEO, Startup Boards, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, and Startup Checklist.
At concept stages, founders should be prepared to do a lot of experimentation and field research to arrive at proof of concept for their idea. It is important to strike a balance between capital efficiency and product or solution completeness.
The founding team should have freshness as well as expertise in some areas like product, domain, business and operations. The founders’ agreement should capture their expectations of contribution, ownership and sharing of equity, as well as ‘what if’ scenarios (eg: redefinitions of roles further down the road; non-compete clauses). There should also be clauses for dispute detection, resolution, mediation, and arbitration.
In the entity-creation phase, most VCs and public funds require the creation of a public limited company. Founders should understand the nuances of holding companies, regional operating firms, overseas registration, and point of effective management (POEM) laws. Early-stage compliance applies to labour laws, environmental laws, IPR, liability acts, taxation, and public procurement.
On the intellectual property front, founders should carefully weigh patent jurisdiction, novelty, licensing, and portfolio management. Patent analytics helps make informed decisions on tech trends, R&D/M&A deals, and even talent management.
For startups filing for patents, there should be clear demarcation of public information, confidential information (only for employees), and classified information (only for core team). The authors advise founders to invest in creation, protection, and monetising of IP as relevant; it can also be a long, tedious, and costly process.
Marketing online and offline should be guided by market size, market wealth, competitive presence, and value proposition. Startups should have clear strategies for targeting customers, employees, media and investors.
There will be different Above the Line (ATL) and Below the Line (BTL) considerations for B2C and B2B contexts. Commission models and network effects will take some time to kick in, but can be well worth the wait.
Funding options include seed funding (Rs 10–30 lakh for 1–3 percent equity), angel funding (Rs 70 lakh–7 crore for 15–29 percent equity), and Series A (starting at Rs 14 crore, for a 24-month runway and 20 percent stake). A full-time finance person is required from angel-funded stage onwards, and a balance between market share and profit share will need to be struck at the Series A stage. Startups seeking the accelerator route may find that some companies make investments while others give grants.
Provisions and outcomes should be made for raising funds in multiple tranches and bridge rounds, along with requirements like board rights for directors and observers. Alignment between founder and investor is key for long-term success, especially with respect to exit rights and transfer rights.
In sum, the book gives a good conceptual overview with operational insights for new founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. Other resources, consultants, professionals and mentors will add further value as the startup scales (see also the article Understanding the science and art of engaging advisors and mentors).
Source:
https://yourstory.com/2017/11/the-manual-for-indian-startups-a-guide-to-documents-plans-templates-and-agreements/
The book is authored by Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi (co-founder of Crayon Data), Meena Ganesh (CEO of Portea Medical), Alok Mittal (co-founder of Indifi), Sriram Subramanya (founder of Integra Software), and Prof. S. Sadagopan (Director of IIIT-Bangalore).
“The operating models of startup ventures in India differ from the Western models,” explains Infosys Co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan in the foreword. The book provides the Indian context in terms of compliance and documentation needs, and has been supported by CII’s Startup Council.
I have listed some of the necessary documents, plans, templates and agreements in Table 1. The book ends with a state-wise list of 64 incubators in India along with hub location and contact information (see also YourStory’s Startup Hatch profiles of accelerators and incubators).
The material is spread across 142 pages and makes for a quick read, but its real value is as a handy reference and process guide to make sure a startup is on track and does not face nasty operational surprises down the road. Related books reviewed by YourStory include Startup CEO, Startup Boards, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, and Startup Checklist.
At concept stages, founders should be prepared to do a lot of experimentation and field research to arrive at proof of concept for their idea. It is important to strike a balance between capital efficiency and product or solution completeness.
The founding team should have freshness as well as expertise in some areas like product, domain, business and operations. The founders’ agreement should capture their expectations of contribution, ownership and sharing of equity, as well as ‘what if’ scenarios (eg: redefinitions of roles further down the road; non-compete clauses). There should also be clauses for dispute detection, resolution, mediation, and arbitration.
In the entity-creation phase, most VCs and public funds require the creation of a public limited company. Founders should understand the nuances of holding companies, regional operating firms, overseas registration, and point of effective management (POEM) laws. Early-stage compliance applies to labour laws, environmental laws, IPR, liability acts, taxation, and public procurement.
On the intellectual property front, founders should carefully weigh patent jurisdiction, novelty, licensing, and portfolio management. Patent analytics helps make informed decisions on tech trends, R&D/M&A deals, and even talent management.
For startups filing for patents, there should be clear demarcation of public information, confidential information (only for employees), and classified information (only for core team). The authors advise founders to invest in creation, protection, and monetising of IP as relevant; it can also be a long, tedious, and costly process.
Marketing online and offline should be guided by market size, market wealth, competitive presence, and value proposition. Startups should have clear strategies for targeting customers, employees, media and investors.
There will be different Above the Line (ATL) and Below the Line (BTL) considerations for B2C and B2B contexts. Commission models and network effects will take some time to kick in, but can be well worth the wait.
Funding options include seed funding (Rs 10–30 lakh for 1–3 percent equity), angel funding (Rs 70 lakh–7 crore for 15–29 percent equity), and Series A (starting at Rs 14 crore, for a 24-month runway and 20 percent stake). A full-time finance person is required from angel-funded stage onwards, and a balance between market share and profit share will need to be struck at the Series A stage. Startups seeking the accelerator route may find that some companies make investments while others give grants.
Provisions and outcomes should be made for raising funds in multiple tranches and bridge rounds, along with requirements like board rights for directors and observers. Alignment between founder and investor is key for long-term success, especially with respect to exit rights and transfer rights.
In sum, the book gives a good conceptual overview with operational insights for new founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. Other resources, consultants, professionals and mentors will add further value as the startup scales (see also the article Understanding the science and art of engaging advisors and mentors).
Source:
https://yourstory.com/2017/11/the-manual-for-indian-startups-a-guide-to-documents-plans-templates-and-agreements/
Declines in U.S. innovation, entrepreneurship the focus at Capitol Hill patent policy event - IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Patent Law
By: Steve Brachmann
“Innovation and creative endeavors are indispensable elements that drive economic growth and sustain the competitive edge of the U.S. economy.” Thus reads the start of the executive summary for the 2016 update to the Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy study jointly produced by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as well as the Economics & Statistics Administration. The report identifies 81 IP-intensive industries which employ about 30 percent of the American workforce and account for 38.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2014.
“All of the giants today were once garage startups that clawed, fought and used every means to their advantage to overcome the incumbents,” said Robert Aronoff, executive director of the U.S. chapter of the International IP Commercialization Council (IIPCC). “These companies benefited greatly from the system as it was.” Aronoff’s remarks came at the start of an IIPCC-sponsored event taking place in the basement of the U.S. Capitol on May 8th, an event titled Promoting Innovation, Investment and Job Growth by Fixing America’s Patent System. The event featured a series of panels and keynote speakers addressing various concerns raised over recent changes to the U.S. patent system and how those changes have created an uneven playing field to the detriment of individual and small startup stakeholders in the system. See our other coverage here, here and here.
Anyone who has paid attention to the current political climate in the United States, especially conversations surrounding economic nationalism and the renegotiation of international trade agreements, would have to acknowledge that there are many who feel as though the American economy is lagging. Last October, The Wall Street Journal published a story titled Sputtering Startups Weigh Down Growth which outlined the gradual decline of U.S. startups since 1977. In 2014, only 8 percent of private U.S. firms were less than one year old, down from more than 16 percent in 1977. As well, the share of U.S. workers working at firms less than one year old has dipped over that same period of time from nearly 6 percent of U.S. workers in 1977 down to 2.1 percent in 2014.
At the same time that America’s business climate has become too acidic for a vast majority of domestic startups, the nation has also been losing its place in the global supply chain while other major global economies, like China’s, are becoming increasingly self-reliant. Another Wall Street Journal article published last October not only showed recent dips in the value of China’s overall imports and high tech imports but also the percentage of foreign inputs used in Chinese exports. Such foreign inputs in products sold by Chinese manufacturers rose sharply from just more than 5 percent in 1981 up past 40 percent by the mid-1990s, but these foreign inputs dropped steadily to 19.65 percent by 2015. “There’s less and less reason why they need us, they’re protecting their innovation and tech more and more,” Aronoff said of China, adding that this issue deserved further discussion.
Still other issues facing innovators hoping to use the U.S. patent system to commercialize emerging technologies were highlighted by a Hope Cycle for Emerging Technology report issued last year by market research firm Gartner. This report identifies trending emerging tech like virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, smart robots, gesture control devices, smart data discovery and virtual personal assistants, as well as consumer expectation levels and the length of time until the emerging tech becomes fully commercializable. As Aronoff noted, much of the innovation in those sectors relies on software. “Is that even protectable anymore?” Aronoff asked.
“We’re here to have a frank discussion about, ‘Are we doing the right things to protect the engine of innovation of America,” Aronoff said. He highlighted several issues that would be discussed at length throughout the day, including the need for patents, costs/benefits of patent licensing and patent invalidation, patent monopoly and patent troll myths, the state of the U.S. patent system from the trenches, costs/benefits of a strong U.S. patent system and strategies for getting the country back on track in terms of sensible patent policy. “With the new patent enforcement gauntlet in the U.S., what does it really take for a small company to protect its IP in the current system?” Aronoff asked, adding that the patent troll myth could very well be a red herring which has distracted U.S. patent policy makers.
Aronoff’s remarks were followed by Dr. Carl Schramm, professor at Syracuse University and an U.S. IIPCC board member. “There’s an entrepreneur crisis in the U.S., which is reflective of an innovation crisis,” Schramm said, adding that while the two distressing trends were happening together, they weren’t being well understood or seen by mainstream observers.
Schramm led off his remarks by pointing to a couple of inverse correlations, which can be inferred when looking at U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation. Despite the fact that academic programs for entrepreneurship have exploded from four schools in 1990 up to more than 3,000 schools employing more than 6,000 entrepreneurship professors currently, and yet U.S. entrepreneurship has declined. Similarly, business incubators have spurted from 12 local incubators in 2002 up through 1,400 such incubators today. “The more of them we open, the fewer entrepreneurs we produce,” Schramm said. He added that less than 20 percent of such incubators currently keep statistics on the success of incubator startups, calling that a “terribly disturbing statistical vacuum.” “Why would local guys who are mostly picked by governors and mayors to be venture capital advisors do better than the professionals?” Schramm asked. “There is no science in this business.”
Teaching students to become entrepreneurs in their early 20s is something that we’re “enamored with” in the U.S. but young adults have a limited worldview compared to those in their late 30s; the average age of a person beginning a successful startup earning over $1 million in yearly revenues is 39. In Schramm’s view, about 70 percent of the startup ideas coming from students in university entrepreneur programs relate to university-specific problems, such as reducing food waste in cafeterias or parking management systems for football stadiums.
Schramm wound up his remarks by focusing on four aspects of the current landscape affecting American innovation, beginning with the sensitivity of American innovators to the signals that it’s becoming more difficult to be a successful innovator as an individual. Much of this sensitivity has been triggered by an abundance of regulations which have left business students with questions as to whether the federal government will essentially need to approve new business concepts or industries. “If you don’t think that it’s an overburden on people’s ability to think freely, you are really, really wrong,” Schramm said.
Another issue has been the consolidation of power into larger firms which has led to a presumption that big business is where true innovation occurs. Schramm pointed to the consolidation of the U.S. healthcare industry which has been impacted most significantly by the 2010 enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As a result, the number of healthcare companies has dropped drastically from the 211 health insurance providers operating prior to the ACA. “America is moving in a direction where government, big business and big labor would control the economy and give us endless prosperity,” Schramm said. “It doesn’t work, and it couldn’t work because it stands in the place of the individual.”
The consolidation of larger firms leads to Schramm’s next point, that current viewpoints on antitrust litigation were rather lax. Whereas entrepreneurs used to create companies with venture capital investment which they saw as their life’s work, Scramm said that 80 percent of startups today are sold to other companies. Many startups have exit strategies in place which consider a sale before the company even begins operations. “It’s very hard to find an entrepreneur who says that ‘I’m going to build this company in my vision,’” Schramm said. Finally, Schramm noted the “dangerous vision” that jurisprudence on patent policy and other issues were shifting from the United States to Europe. “We’re the only country on Earth that does things really right,” Schramm said. “Any time I hear that we’re going to harmonize with Europe, I get hives.”
Source:
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/05/17/declines-u-s-innovation-entrepreneurship/id=83302/
“Innovation and creative endeavors are indispensable elements that drive economic growth and sustain the competitive edge of the U.S. economy.” Thus reads the start of the executive summary for the 2016 update to the Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy study jointly produced by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as well as the Economics & Statistics Administration. The report identifies 81 IP-intensive industries which employ about 30 percent of the American workforce and account for 38.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2014.
“All of the giants today were once garage startups that clawed, fought and used every means to their advantage to overcome the incumbents,” said Robert Aronoff, executive director of the U.S. chapter of the International IP Commercialization Council (IIPCC). “These companies benefited greatly from the system as it was.” Aronoff’s remarks came at the start of an IIPCC-sponsored event taking place in the basement of the U.S. Capitol on May 8th, an event titled Promoting Innovation, Investment and Job Growth by Fixing America’s Patent System. The event featured a series of panels and keynote speakers addressing various concerns raised over recent changes to the U.S. patent system and how those changes have created an uneven playing field to the detriment of individual and small startup stakeholders in the system. See our other coverage here, here and here.
Anyone who has paid attention to the current political climate in the United States, especially conversations surrounding economic nationalism and the renegotiation of international trade agreements, would have to acknowledge that there are many who feel as though the American economy is lagging. Last October, The Wall Street Journal published a story titled Sputtering Startups Weigh Down Growth which outlined the gradual decline of U.S. startups since 1977. In 2014, only 8 percent of private U.S. firms were less than one year old, down from more than 16 percent in 1977. As well, the share of U.S. workers working at firms less than one year old has dipped over that same period of time from nearly 6 percent of U.S. workers in 1977 down to 2.1 percent in 2014.
At the same time that America’s business climate has become too acidic for a vast majority of domestic startups, the nation has also been losing its place in the global supply chain while other major global economies, like China’s, are becoming increasingly self-reliant. Another Wall Street Journal article published last October not only showed recent dips in the value of China’s overall imports and high tech imports but also the percentage of foreign inputs used in Chinese exports. Such foreign inputs in products sold by Chinese manufacturers rose sharply from just more than 5 percent in 1981 up past 40 percent by the mid-1990s, but these foreign inputs dropped steadily to 19.65 percent by 2015. “There’s less and less reason why they need us, they’re protecting their innovation and tech more and more,” Aronoff said of China, adding that this issue deserved further discussion.
Still other issues facing innovators hoping to use the U.S. patent system to commercialize emerging technologies were highlighted by a Hope Cycle for Emerging Technology report issued last year by market research firm Gartner. This report identifies trending emerging tech like virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, smart robots, gesture control devices, smart data discovery and virtual personal assistants, as well as consumer expectation levels and the length of time until the emerging tech becomes fully commercializable. As Aronoff noted, much of the innovation in those sectors relies on software. “Is that even protectable anymore?” Aronoff asked.
“We’re here to have a frank discussion about, ‘Are we doing the right things to protect the engine of innovation of America,” Aronoff said. He highlighted several issues that would be discussed at length throughout the day, including the need for patents, costs/benefits of patent licensing and patent invalidation, patent monopoly and patent troll myths, the state of the U.S. patent system from the trenches, costs/benefits of a strong U.S. patent system and strategies for getting the country back on track in terms of sensible patent policy. “With the new patent enforcement gauntlet in the U.S., what does it really take for a small company to protect its IP in the current system?” Aronoff asked, adding that the patent troll myth could very well be a red herring which has distracted U.S. patent policy makers.
Aronoff’s remarks were followed by Dr. Carl Schramm, professor at Syracuse University and an U.S. IIPCC board member. “There’s an entrepreneur crisis in the U.S., which is reflective of an innovation crisis,” Schramm said, adding that while the two distressing trends were happening together, they weren’t being well understood or seen by mainstream observers.
Schramm led off his remarks by pointing to a couple of inverse correlations, which can be inferred when looking at U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation. Despite the fact that academic programs for entrepreneurship have exploded from four schools in 1990 up to more than 3,000 schools employing more than 6,000 entrepreneurship professors currently, and yet U.S. entrepreneurship has declined. Similarly, business incubators have spurted from 12 local incubators in 2002 up through 1,400 such incubators today. “The more of them we open, the fewer entrepreneurs we produce,” Schramm said. He added that less than 20 percent of such incubators currently keep statistics on the success of incubator startups, calling that a “terribly disturbing statistical vacuum.” “Why would local guys who are mostly picked by governors and mayors to be venture capital advisors do better than the professionals?” Schramm asked. “There is no science in this business.”
Teaching students to become entrepreneurs in their early 20s is something that we’re “enamored with” in the U.S. but young adults have a limited worldview compared to those in their late 30s; the average age of a person beginning a successful startup earning over $1 million in yearly revenues is 39. In Schramm’s view, about 70 percent of the startup ideas coming from students in university entrepreneur programs relate to university-specific problems, such as reducing food waste in cafeterias or parking management systems for football stadiums.
Schramm wound up his remarks by focusing on four aspects of the current landscape affecting American innovation, beginning with the sensitivity of American innovators to the signals that it’s becoming more difficult to be a successful innovator as an individual. Much of this sensitivity has been triggered by an abundance of regulations which have left business students with questions as to whether the federal government will essentially need to approve new business concepts or industries. “If you don’t think that it’s an overburden on people’s ability to think freely, you are really, really wrong,” Schramm said.
Another issue has been the consolidation of power into larger firms which has led to a presumption that big business is where true innovation occurs. Schramm pointed to the consolidation of the U.S. healthcare industry which has been impacted most significantly by the 2010 enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As a result, the number of healthcare companies has dropped drastically from the 211 health insurance providers operating prior to the ACA. “America is moving in a direction where government, big business and big labor would control the economy and give us endless prosperity,” Schramm said. “It doesn’t work, and it couldn’t work because it stands in the place of the individual.”
The consolidation of larger firms leads to Schramm’s next point, that current viewpoints on antitrust litigation were rather lax. Whereas entrepreneurs used to create companies with venture capital investment which they saw as their life’s work, Scramm said that 80 percent of startups today are sold to other companies. Many startups have exit strategies in place which consider a sale before the company even begins operations. “It’s very hard to find an entrepreneur who says that ‘I’m going to build this company in my vision,’” Schramm said. Finally, Schramm noted the “dangerous vision” that jurisprudence on patent policy and other issues were shifting from the United States to Europe. “We’re the only country on Earth that does things really right,” Schramm said. “Any time I hear that we’re going to harmonize with Europe, I get hives.”
Source:
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/05/17/declines-u-s-innovation-entrepreneurship/id=83302/
Guide to Intellectual Property Law
By: Harrison Barnes
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.
Probably the hottest practice group in all respects for the past several years has been intellectual property law. However, many attorneys have little idea (1) what the definition of intellectual property law is, (2) why intellectual property is so popular, and (3) the four types of intellectual property attorneys and what area is the most marketable. The purpose of this article is to answer the question ”What is IP law?” and these other two questions.
A. What is the definition of Intellectual Property Law?
1. Intellectual Property is a Term Encompassing Several Different Fields
On a daily basis, attorneys call us and say they want to do intellectual property law. We are always interested in talking to an attorney with experience in intellectual property law because it is, generally speaking, one of hottest practice areas in the United States. Most sophisticated firms in every market that we serve have an interest in intellectual property attorneys with certain backgrounds. However, "intellectual property law" is a very general term. There are many types of intellectual property law, and many areas of intellectual property law are not hot at all. To define what intellectual property law means and what’s hot and what’s not is very important to our discussion.
One of the most amusing facets of intellectual property law to us is that unless someone is practicing it, or quite familiar with it, he/she is unlikely to have a good idea about what the meaning of intellectual property law is. We have found that there is a bit of confusion with respect to what it really means to be an intellectual property lawyer.
Recently, one of our recruiters received a call from the Managing Partner of a well-known law firm. This Managing Partner had been practicing law in excess of two decades and was very well known in a practice area other than intellectual property. This a rough approximation of what this conversation went like:
Similarly, each and every day we receive calls from associates who say something like the following to us: "I am currently a litigator; however, I went to X Law School, which is ranked very highly in intellectual property law. I want to join a firm where I can do more intellectual property law." When this same associate is asked what kind of intellectual property law he/she would like to do, he/she inevitably replies, "What do you mean?" At that we point we guess that the caller really doesn’t know what the answer to this question is: what do intellectual property attorneys do?
If you are already an intellectual property attorney, you can appreciate how humorous these conversations are when someone asks (after a while): what is an intellectual property lawyer anyway? At the end of this article, if you currently know little about intellectual property law, you will understand why these exchanges are so humorous.
2. What Intellectual Property Attorneys Do
The term "intellectual property" is used in its general sense to describe:
A product of the intellect that has commercial value, including copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright© 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.)
Intellectual property examples include music, books, movies, artwork, product names, logos, slogans and packaging, inventions that qualify for patent protection, and information that is kept secret and not commonly known. Over the past 200 years, a variety of laws have developed within the United States to give intellectual works the same protections that real estate or other forms of property enjoy under the law. Indeed, intellectual property can be bought or sold just like a house or a car. Intellectual property types can even be leased out.
Read More >> https://www.bcgsearch.com/article/60593/Guide-to-intellectual-property-law/
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.
Probably the hottest practice group in all respects for the past several years has been intellectual property law. However, many attorneys have little idea (1) what the definition of intellectual property law is, (2) why intellectual property is so popular, and (3) the four types of intellectual property attorneys and what area is the most marketable. The purpose of this article is to answer the question ”What is IP law?” and these other two questions.
A. What is the definition of Intellectual Property Law?
1. Intellectual Property is a Term Encompassing Several Different Fields
On a daily basis, attorneys call us and say they want to do intellectual property law. We are always interested in talking to an attorney with experience in intellectual property law because it is, generally speaking, one of hottest practice areas in the United States. Most sophisticated firms in every market that we serve have an interest in intellectual property attorneys with certain backgrounds. However, "intellectual property law" is a very general term. There are many types of intellectual property law, and many areas of intellectual property law are not hot at all. To define what intellectual property law means and what’s hot and what’s not is very important to our discussion.
One of the most amusing facets of intellectual property law to us is that unless someone is practicing it, or quite familiar with it, he/she is unlikely to have a good idea about what the meaning of intellectual property law is. We have found that there is a bit of confusion with respect to what it really means to be an intellectual property lawyer.
Recently, one of our recruiters received a call from the Managing Partner of a well-known law firm. This Managing Partner had been practicing law in excess of two decades and was very well known in a practice area other than intellectual property. This a rough approximation of what this conversation went like:
Similarly, each and every day we receive calls from associates who say something like the following to us: "I am currently a litigator; however, I went to X Law School, which is ranked very highly in intellectual property law. I want to join a firm where I can do more intellectual property law." When this same associate is asked what kind of intellectual property law he/she would like to do, he/she inevitably replies, "What do you mean?" At that we point we guess that the caller really doesn’t know what the answer to this question is: what do intellectual property attorneys do?
If you are already an intellectual property attorney, you can appreciate how humorous these conversations are when someone asks (after a while): what is an intellectual property lawyer anyway? At the end of this article, if you currently know little about intellectual property law, you will understand why these exchanges are so humorous.
2. What Intellectual Property Attorneys Do
The term "intellectual property" is used in its general sense to describe:
A product of the intellect that has commercial value, including copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright© 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.)
Intellectual property examples include music, books, movies, artwork, product names, logos, slogans and packaging, inventions that qualify for patent protection, and information that is kept secret and not commonly known. Over the past 200 years, a variety of laws have developed within the United States to give intellectual works the same protections that real estate or other forms of property enjoy under the law. Indeed, intellectual property can be bought or sold just like a house or a car. Intellectual property types can even be leased out.
Read More >> https://www.bcgsearch.com/article/60593/Guide-to-intellectual-property-law/
A Lean Startup Definition of Innovation
By: Tendayi Viki
In my previous post, I wrote about the false choices that innovators face. These choices seem to present teams with the option of using business plans to manage innovation or just doing it without a plan, and basing decisions on vision. Often customers are excluded from the process in both cases. And this ultimately leads to innovators failing to make stuff people want.
At the end of the post, I also wrote about a third way which is based on the toolbox that lean startup methods bring to the table. But to fully understand how the lean startup toolbox can help, we need a clear definition of what innovation really is. Without a shared view of what constitutes successful innovation, management and their teams will often speak at cross-purposes and conduct their work with different expectations. The goal of this post is to help provide some of this alignment.
Innovation Is Not Creativity
Creativity is an important part of innovation. I would even go as far as saying that you can’t have innovation without some elements of creativity. However, novelty or newness by itself does not an innovation make. My gripe with the “just do it” camp of innovation is that they place too much emphasis on the value of ideas. Yes, cool new ideas are important. But even with the coolest idea ever, this coolness factor will not make it an innovation. Sorry!
There a load of patents at the US patent office right now that have never been commercial successes. The inventors and scientist made some cool discovery and came up with some interesting stuff, but this is not innovation. These are starving artists. The ones who makes critically acclaimed art but never reach the levels of commercial success necessary to stop working at McDonalds.
To be certain, there is the place for that sort of creativity in the world. My favorite hip-hop artists, the ones I considered to be the best lyricists ever, have never had a number one record on billboard. Some of my favorite gadgets were ultimately flops in the market. They were great to see and we were all wowed by them, but their market failure means that they cannot be considered successful innovations.
And so it is for large companies. Innovation is not setting up a labs, painting white walls, putting in bean bags, postit notes, sharpies and business model canvases; and then telling your people to come up with some cool new products. Innovation is a process that needs management. Giving people a creative space is not enough. To be successful, we have to understand that: Innovation is the combination of creative ideas and sustainably profitable business models.
What Is Sustainable Profitability?
I will reiterate that creativity is an important ingredient for innovation. Creativity has been an important part of our progress as humanity. But the products, ideas and discoveries that have made the most impact on human progress are those that have gained some sort of traction. This usually involves some exchange of value between the innovators and the users of the innovation. And so to do innovation well, we have to accept that customers are the ultimate arbiters of value.
But what do we mean when we say sustainably profitable business models. To my mind, a sustainable business model is one in which we make stuff people want, and we also figure out a way to create and deliver that value to customers in a manner that is sustainably profitable. Without these elements you do not have successful innovation.
It is possible to make money while delivering rubbish products. This might be for various reasons. Your company may have a lock on the market with high switching costs. Customers may have no other alternatives for meeting their needs. If this is your business model, good luck to you. But you are a charlatan! You might be making money now, but your are a snake oil salesman. You will be found out soon enough!
The Sweet Spot of Innovation
Steve Blank defines startups as temporary organization setup to search for a sustainable business models. The sweet spot of innovation is when your teams have developed a really cool new products, that meet customer needs and make sustainable profits. So in our new book The Corporate Startup, we provide the following lean startup based definition:
Innovation is the creation of new products and services, that deliver value to customers, in a manner that is supported by a sustainable and profitable business model.
Non-Profit Innovation
When I present the above graphic, I often get push-back from two groups of people; those working in non-profits and those that work on improving internal processes for companies that are not directly customer facing. My answer to them, is that regardless of what you are working on, it cannot be considered innovative unless it has a lasting impact. To classify something as an innovation I look for more than just a great new management process, a great new discovery in medicine or a new method for helping the vulnerable in our society.
I also look for whether the new thing that has been developed meets people’s needs well, and whether we have discovered a sustainable method for making sure we continue to meet people’s needs. Even internal management processes have customers (i.e. the employees who use them). In a recent water resources hackathon I co-hosted for The World Bank in Harare, we placed a strict requirement on the teams that they had to hack around the needs of citizens, rather than try to come up with anything that is cool and interesting. They also had to think about how their solutions could be sustainably taken to scale.
The Job Of Innovators
Management in established companies often struggles to figure how to manage the intrapreneurs in their businesses. What are we to expect from them? But with the definition above, we can start to build management frameworks for innovation. We now know that the job of innovators is not to simply come up with cool new stuff. They have to do that; and also discover sustainable business models. This expectation provides us with clues of how we can manage innovation without the need for business plans.
Source:
https://medium.com/the-corporate-startup/a-lean-startup-definition-of-innovation-af5bb72c836d
In my previous post, I wrote about the false choices that innovators face. These choices seem to present teams with the option of using business plans to manage innovation or just doing it without a plan, and basing decisions on vision. Often customers are excluded from the process in both cases. And this ultimately leads to innovators failing to make stuff people want.
At the end of the post, I also wrote about a third way which is based on the toolbox that lean startup methods bring to the table. But to fully understand how the lean startup toolbox can help, we need a clear definition of what innovation really is. Without a shared view of what constitutes successful innovation, management and their teams will often speak at cross-purposes and conduct their work with different expectations. The goal of this post is to help provide some of this alignment.
Innovation Is Not Creativity
Creativity is an important part of innovation. I would even go as far as saying that you can’t have innovation without some elements of creativity. However, novelty or newness by itself does not an innovation make. My gripe with the “just do it” camp of innovation is that they place too much emphasis on the value of ideas. Yes, cool new ideas are important. But even with the coolest idea ever, this coolness factor will not make it an innovation. Sorry!
There a load of patents at the US patent office right now that have never been commercial successes. The inventors and scientist made some cool discovery and came up with some interesting stuff, but this is not innovation. These are starving artists. The ones who makes critically acclaimed art but never reach the levels of commercial success necessary to stop working at McDonalds.
To be certain, there is the place for that sort of creativity in the world. My favorite hip-hop artists, the ones I considered to be the best lyricists ever, have never had a number one record on billboard. Some of my favorite gadgets were ultimately flops in the market. They were great to see and we were all wowed by them, but their market failure means that they cannot be considered successful innovations.
And so it is for large companies. Innovation is not setting up a labs, painting white walls, putting in bean bags, postit notes, sharpies and business model canvases; and then telling your people to come up with some cool new products. Innovation is a process that needs management. Giving people a creative space is not enough. To be successful, we have to understand that: Innovation is the combination of creative ideas and sustainably profitable business models.
What Is Sustainable Profitability?
I will reiterate that creativity is an important ingredient for innovation. Creativity has been an important part of our progress as humanity. But the products, ideas and discoveries that have made the most impact on human progress are those that have gained some sort of traction. This usually involves some exchange of value between the innovators and the users of the innovation. And so to do innovation well, we have to accept that customers are the ultimate arbiters of value.
But what do we mean when we say sustainably profitable business models. To my mind, a sustainable business model is one in which we make stuff people want, and we also figure out a way to create and deliver that value to customers in a manner that is sustainably profitable. Without these elements you do not have successful innovation.
It is possible to make money while delivering rubbish products. This might be for various reasons. Your company may have a lock on the market with high switching costs. Customers may have no other alternatives for meeting their needs. If this is your business model, good luck to you. But you are a charlatan! You might be making money now, but your are a snake oil salesman. You will be found out soon enough!
The Sweet Spot of Innovation
Steve Blank defines startups as temporary organization setup to search for a sustainable business models. The sweet spot of innovation is when your teams have developed a really cool new products, that meet customer needs and make sustainable profits. So in our new book The Corporate Startup, we provide the following lean startup based definition:
Innovation is the creation of new products and services, that deliver value to customers, in a manner that is supported by a sustainable and profitable business model.
Non-Profit Innovation
When I present the above graphic, I often get push-back from two groups of people; those working in non-profits and those that work on improving internal processes for companies that are not directly customer facing. My answer to them, is that regardless of what you are working on, it cannot be considered innovative unless it has a lasting impact. To classify something as an innovation I look for more than just a great new management process, a great new discovery in medicine or a new method for helping the vulnerable in our society.
I also look for whether the new thing that has been developed meets people’s needs well, and whether we have discovered a sustainable method for making sure we continue to meet people’s needs. Even internal management processes have customers (i.e. the employees who use them). In a recent water resources hackathon I co-hosted for The World Bank in Harare, we placed a strict requirement on the teams that they had to hack around the needs of citizens, rather than try to come up with anything that is cool and interesting. They also had to think about how their solutions could be sustainably taken to scale.
The Job Of Innovators
Management in established companies often struggles to figure how to manage the intrapreneurs in their businesses. What are we to expect from them? But with the definition above, we can start to build management frameworks for innovation. We now know that the job of innovators is not to simply come up with cool new stuff. They have to do that; and also discover sustainable business models. This expectation provides us with clues of how we can manage innovation without the need for business plans.
Source:
https://medium.com/the-corporate-startup/a-lean-startup-definition-of-innovation-af5bb72c836d
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