With market economics crossing borders and growing at a galloping pace, business requirements are changing on a day to day basis. Previously, Intellectual Property had one direction, i.e., protecting the intellect. However, with the changing scenarios, Intellectual Property Practitioners are now wearing the hats of technical and business consultants too, beyond legal.
Also, Intellectual Property related data whether it is published patent application or granted ones, published trademarks, designs, has been growing at a tremendous pace and have started giving a lot of insight into various competitive analysis, technology movement, investments, mergers & acquisitions, collaborations, top research and technology human resources, market landscape, production strategies, etc.
We pursue various kinds of consulting projects to support the clients, some of them are detailed below:
Innovation/ Invention Harvesting Consulting:
In this process, we hand-hold research based organizations to identify specific technical areas that they should start functioning. It includes a substantial dialogue process through which we understand the perspective of the organization, how it is getting ready for future and then supply with reports to set out a Technology Landscape, further we help them to identify white-spaces in the technology area and other unsolved problems, which is further continued to identify various objects and problems, and those are further taken up in workshops and sessions with the research and engineering teams to solve the identified problems and to achieve the desired object, which leads into various inventions. The inventions can be further groomed with our service of Invention Disclosure Development.
Invention Disclosure Development:
Initially when the inventions are identified, they are generally ideas in abstract form, which are not patentable. These so called ideas are further required to be groomed. This is another dialogue process where our executives have multiple sessions with the inventors to help them in developing invention disclosures for patentable inventions.
Invention Disclosure development is further supplemented with various prior art searches till the idea is perceived into a Patent-able solution.
Technology Scouting:
Through the Invention harvesting, generally the services are developed in-house, however many times the companies do not carry out inventing and research activities in house, rather they look for partners to do so.
We support such companies to identify a particular technology that should be procured, either by in-licensing of existing technologies or identifying partners to develop the required technologies. In both the cases, we hand-hold with the organization with the end project execution, i.e., prospecting, establishing and maintaining dialogues between the stake-holders, supporting in negotiation process, carrying out any Audits required, preparing the legal binding agreements, getting the agreements executed, effectuating the process movement, enforcing the time lines and deliverables, till the end of project to ensure the deliverables and trainings.
Re-engineering Support:
For some organizations, they are quite good at engineering and do not have capacity to get into research for various up gradation of their products/services. To them, we help to identify the solutions which are available through various publications and have not been protected under patents. For this purpose we carry out an extensive publication research, including patent literature, further we validate whether there is a pending patent application or granted patent for target geographies/market, which is further moved to the re-engineering team.
While re-engineering, if any technical problem is identified, same process of scouting is repeated till the technology is ready and available. Sometimes, during this process, few inventions are generated too, which help to create a monopoly and market position too for an organization.
Work around Support:
During a Freedom to Operate Analysis, many times blocking patents are identified, which stalls the product to market process.
At these stages, we help out the organizations to get an alternative to the blocking patent technology, by either doing similar research like in Re-engineering support, or by setting up sessions with the inventors to sensitize avoiding any part of the claims, or setting up a process for Invention Harvesting to reach the desired object or solve the similar problem in a way different to the blocking technology.
Business or Market Research:
In last few years, lot of patents, trademarks, designs have been filed and enormous data has been generated at various patent offices. Using this enormous data and various analytical tools, we conduct various customized studies to carry out various Business and Market objectives, like region of specific technical focus, probable vendors and clients, available market players, and many such business or market research.
Competitive Analysis:
Huge patent data from various patent office’s gives a strong insight into competitors technologies, their strategic movements, their IPR strategies, comparison of technology portfolios between competitors portfolio and yours, bench-marking of technologies with that of competitors and various other such customized and focused studies.
Intellectual Property Audit:
During Merger & Acquisitions, with respect to various other assets scrutiny, intellectual property scrutiny is also required. Such scrutiny is a tedious auditing process, where quality of the rights, licences of the rights, collaborative efforts, encumbrances in the rights, technical assessment and enforceability of the trademarks, patents, designs, etc.
Now a days, organizations also do audits of their Intellectual Property to keep themselves streamlined to business objective, pruning of the portfolios, enforcement of the rights, and for keeping themselves immune to infringement of Third Party IP Rights. We help the organization to take IP Audit as one time activity to meet a particular objective or align it to their business processes, so that the organization keep a track to maintain a healthy and competitive IP Portfolio.
