It’s easy to assume that a company has a good process in place for determining what to patent. Unfortunately, this is often not the case—even for large companies with resources. Certainly, some inventions should come from planned research and development.
Categories: Patent Review Committee, Patent Management Process, Boards of Directors
Here’s a newsflash: patents are pretty expensive. Because they are granted on a country by country basis, there are different maintenance and filing fees required by each country in which you’re attempting to obtain a patent. A 2003 study from the United States General Accounting Office reported that the lifetime cost for a small company to file and maintain a patent in the United States (and in 9 other major industrial countries) ranged from US$170,000 to US$340,000 in 2002 Dollars. That’s about $220,000 to $440,000 in 2013 Dollars. It’s also important to note that these figures apply to small companies—which usually pay about half the filing fees that large companies pay.
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.
