As we eagerly wait for our world to return to normal, we begin to understand that the “normal” we face will not be the same as we knew it before. For as long as we can foresee, we will still need to keep distance from others (Enter: Apple’s new app for distance group photos.) And we are becoming more aware of racial inequalities that exist throughout our country. (Enter: Apple and other companies halting facial recognition program sales). See what other companies are doing to move our world along.

It’s no surprise that much of the innovation making the news lately revolves around finding cures, treatments, and/or vaccines for the novel coronavirus. However, some of the IP out there is being created to help us get through our time indoors. Toy and electronic companies are still going strong and robotic deliveries are becoming even more a possibility in the near future. But the most promising patents? Artificial intelligence.

This week Amazon Books has just released “Celebrating Entrepreneurs: How MIT Nurtured Pioneering Entrepreneurs Who Built Great Companies”, by my long-time friend, colleague, and former professor (and boss!), MIT Professor Edward Roberts, who founded and still chairs the MIT entrepreneurship program. The book is available for Kindle (and other electronic downloads at $9.99) and in a beautiful colored paperback (for $50). The web site, CelebratingEntrepreneurs.com, tells much more about the author, the book itself, and provides for direct purchase from Amazon at the pre-publication and early sales discounted prices.

As our previous several articles have highlighted, there is no shortage of innovation taking place during this pandemic. Scientists the world over scramble for answers to very specific and unique pain points, which leads to solutions that might, at least for the moment, infringe upon intellectual property currently patented.

The coronavirus outbreak is the only thing on all of our minds these days. It has changed the scene of industry in so many ways: companies that thought they were car manufacturers are now building ventilators, makers of alcoholic beverages now making sanitizer, and even retired homemakers are contributing to the cause by sewing masks for hospital workers. Among all these changes, what new patents have arrived on the scene to help?

Necessity is the mother of invention, and during these trying times, necessity’s name is COVID-19. The pandemic caught most of the world by surprise, spreading and mutating before scientists could grasp the full potential of the disease and its effects. Those effects, as we’ve discovered, aren’t just physical illness and possible death, but also economic devastation.

Lately there hasn’t been much on the minds of people all across the globe other than keeping germ-free and far away from the Coronavirus. However, the earth still turns each day and scientists are doing what they can to improve the world we’re living in by doing everything from eliminating the virus to cutting toilet paper waste. At the risk of contributing to Coronavirus news fatigue, let’s dive in.

We examine Huawei’s suits against Verizon, some more Apple patents, and dig into a possible treatment for Coronavirus in this month’s patent news, as well as an accidental innovation in the healthcare industry.

This past decade, our world saw incredible steps taken in the realm of technology.  Will that trend continue into the 20s?  Or is there a new hot topic that innovators are focusing on? Technology – especially in the area of headphones, apparently – is not going anywhere, but eyes are turning toward helping the environment now as well.

Active programs for selling patents—particularly in large businesses—weren’t really in use until recent years. This may have been due to lack of inventory control, in which case companies simply didn’t have a solid understanding of what they owned, or a lack of business management, in which case the company had no real understanding of the business applications possible with intellectual property.