The Lemelson-MIT Awards Committee announced that the 2016 Winner of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize is Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab.

According to The Lemelson-MIT Program the Prize "recognizes individuals who translate their ideas into inventions and innovations that improve the world in which we live....Dubbed the "Oscar for Inventors," the Lemelson-MIT Prize is awarded to outstanding mid-career inventors who have developed a patented product or process of significant value to society, which has been adopted for practical use, or has a high probability of being adopted.

Dr. Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab's Camera Culture research group.  His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging, and human-computer interaction.  MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture Group focuses on making the invisible visible–inside our bodies, around us, and beyond–for health, work, and connection.  The goal is to create an entirely new class of imaging platforms that have an understanding of the world that far exceeds human ability and produce meaningful abstractions that are well within human comprehensibility.  The group conducts multi-disciplinary research in modern optics, sensors, illumination, actuators, probes and software processing.  This work ranges from creating novel feature-revealing computational cameras and new lightweight medical imaging mechanisms, to facilitating positive social impact via the next billion personalized cameras.  See: MIT Technology Review for articles and stories about his work.

Patent Portfolio Interconnection Map of Raskar Patents

As of August 2016 Professor Raskar was listed as an inventor on 71 issued U.S. patents and 26 published pending U.S. patent applications.

This IPVision Patent Portfolio Interconnection Map shows the U.S. patents and applications of Ramesh Raskar and the citation relationships within the portfolio.  Note: Click on the Patent Map Image to View an Interactive Patent Map

The Raskar patents have been cited by 805 other U.S. patents owned by companies such as Microsoft (82 patents), Adobe Systems (53 patents), Seiko Epson (46 patents), Fotonation (38 patents) and Canon (26 patents) among a total of 225 organizations holding patents that cite one or more of Dr. Raskar's U.S. patent properties.

IPVision Report Provided to Lemelson-MIT Prize Committee

IPVision provided the Lemelson-MIT Prize Committee with patent analysis reports on each of the semi-finalist and finalist nominees for the 2016 Lemelson-MIT Prize.   Obtain a free copy of the IPVision Patent Analysis Report on Ramesh Raskar.

The Lemelson-MIT Awards Committee announced that the 2014 Winner of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize is Sangetta Bhatia, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

According to The Lemelson-MIT Program the Prize "recognizes individuals who translate their ideas into inventions and innovations that improve the world in which we live....Dubbed the "Oscar for Inventors," the Lemelson-MIT Prize is awarded to outstanding mid-career inventors who have developed a patented product or process of significant value to society, which has been adopted for practical use, or has a high probability of being adopted."

Trained as both a physician and engineer, Bhatia is dedicated to leveraging miniaturization tools from the world of semiconductor manufacturing to impact human health. She has pioneered technologies for interfacing living cells with synthetic systems, enabling new applications in tissue regeneration, stem cell differentiation, medical diagnostics and drug delivery. Her multidisciplinary team has developed a broad and impactful range of inventions, including human micro livers which model human drug metabolism, liver disease, and interaction with pathogens, and a suite of communicating nanomaterials that can be used to interrogate, monitor and treat cancer and other diseases.  See: MIT Technology Review for articles and stories about her work.

Patent Portfolio Interconnection Map of Belcher Patents

As of June 2014 Professor Belcher was listed as an inventor on 11 issued U.S. patents and 27 published pending U.S. patent applications.

This IPVision Patent Portfolio Interconnection Map shows the U.S. patents and applications of Sangetta Bhatia and the citation relationships within the portfolio.  Note: Click on the Patent Map Image to View an Interactive Patent Map

The Bhatia patents have been cited by 243 other U.S. patents owned by companies such as Sanofi-Aventis, C.R. Bard, Insulet Corporation, BioArray Soulutions and Surface Logix.

IPVision Report Provided to Lemelson-MIT Prize Committee

IPVision provided the Lemelson-MIT Prize Committee with patent analysis reports on each of the semi-finalist and finalist nominees for the 2014 Lemelson-MIT Prize.   Obtain a free copy of the IPVision Patent Analysis Report on Sangetta Bhatia.

On July 25, 2014, Bose Corporation filed a patent infringement suit against Beats Electronics, which is in the process of being acquired by Apple for $3 billion.

Let’s take a look at the complaint and what ammunition each side has in its patent portfolio.

Bose alleges that Beats “Studio®” and “Studio® Wireless” brands active noise reduction headphones infringe Bose patented noise cancellation technology.  In the complaint Bose states  “For almost 50 years, Bose has made significant investment in the research, development, engineering, and design of proprietary technologies now implemented in its  products, such as noise cancelling headphones.  Bose’s current line of noise cancelling headphones, for example, embodies inventions protected by at least 36 U.S. patents and applications (22 patents and 14 pending applications) ….. Bose’s latest noise cancelling headphones model, the QC20, is protected by at least 27 U.S. patents and applications (14 patents and 13 pending applications)”.   In the complaint Bose asserts that Beat is infringing the following U.S. patents (the “Asserted Patents”):

My previous article showed how expensive patents are – from $220,000 to $440,000 to file and maintain a patent in the United States and 9 other major industrial countries.  I also discussed one experiment that showed that data driven patent analytics could predict manually determined patent maintenance fee payment decisions over 70% of the time while dramatically reducing the time and cost to conduct the manual review.  In this current article I describe best practice Patent Maintenance Fee Payment Decision Processes.  

IPVision has worked with many companies to implement evidence-based data driven processes for the cost-effective evaluation and management of patents.  The specific processes that are adopted differ somewhat in the details because companies differ in their culture and structure and because of their differing industry technology and competitive environments. 

Although the specific processes differ there are core components in each of these programs.  The following is a step-by-step compendium of the best practices I have seen.

The first article in this series discussed the reasons for increased activity in Patent Portfolio Trafficking, i.e. patent portfolios offered for sale or license.   The second article described how companies with Small Volumes of portfolios to evaluate were able to streamline their patent evaluation processes from weeks to days using a Metric Driven Approach.  The third article looked at companies that have more fully Integrated Patent Analytics into their patent portfolio acquisition process.  This article discusses how organizations dealing with larger volumes of patents are integrating IPVision’s efficient and comprehensive patent evaluation metrics into their processes.

The first article in this series discussed the reasons for increased activity in Patent Portfolio Trafficking, i.e. patent portfolios offered for sale or license.   The second article described how companies with Small Volumes of portfolios to evaluate were able to streamline their patent evaluation processes from weeks to days using a Metric Driven Approach.  This article looks at companies that have more fully integrated patent analytics into their patent portfolio acquisition process.

In the first article of this series we explored the forces that have given rise to a more active market in Patent Portfolio Trafficking. In summary, increased recognition of the value of intellectual assets, increased ability to analyze and measure IP, the Open Innovation movement and increased Senior Management involvement in IP. In this and the following articles of this series we present real cases (disguised for confidentiality) of how companies are trying to deal with Patent Portfolio Trafficking.

The volume of patent portfolio acquisition transactions in the past few years has increased greatly.  Press reports have naturally focused on the “big deals” from a patent valuation viewpoint such as:

• Nortel Networks $4.5B patent sale (2011)
• Google’s $12+B acquisition of Motorola Mobility (2011)
• AOL’s $1B sale of 800+ patents to Microsoft and subsequent sale of 650 patents to Facebook (2012)
• Kodak Digital Imaging Portfolio $525M (2013)

These are certainly impressive and newsworthy but what has not been widely reported is the increasing activity in smaller patent portfolios.   This is the first of a series of articles on this trend and how companies are responding to it.   These articles are based on the work we have been doing in the past 12 months for a wide variety of companies.  In this article we set the stage by looking at the forces that are driving this portfolio trafficking.

Georgia Tech recently announced a "New Patent Mapping System Helps Find Innovation Pathways".   This research created "a new patent mapping system that considers how patents cite one another may help researchers better understand the relationships between technologies – and how they may come together to spur disruptive new areas of innovation."

The first day of Twitter's IPO was spectacular with the stock soaring 73% by the end of the first day of trading.  However, there are storm clouds on the horizon.  As reported by Ingrid Lunden in TechCrunch IBM has alleged that Twitter infringes on "at least three U.S. patents" held by IBM.   To understand this situation IPVision mapped these IBM patents as well as Twitter's own patent portfolio.