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Many of my customers forget the "intention to grant" phase of the patent process. Here’s my guidebook to understanding what it is, why it’s strategic, and how to effectively monitor it to protect your IP: 1. What is it? When a patent office is about to grant a patent, they have to ask the public domain their opinion. 2. How does it work? Companies have 9 months to object to an intention to grant. If they don’t, the patent is granted. 3. What’s the benefit of monitoring it? If your biggest competitor is about to develop something you're also developing, you can try to stop them or find a way to narrow their protections so you still have freedom to operate. Or, if there’s already a lot of prior art, you can collect evidence and help the patent office turn down applications. Ultimately, you have a chance to stop bad or threatening patents from being granted. 4. Why is it crucial to monitor? Many companies don’t use this window of opportunity. They realize a patent infringement too late in the process and then end up in court in 5 countries to nullify the patent. It’s expensive and time-consuming. If they’d stopped a patent application in the intention to grant phase and talked directly to the patent office, they could have skipped the legal process entirely. 5. How to use it to your strategic advantage If there is a pending patent that poses a potential (but not direct) problem for you, but is a *huge* problem for your competitor, you can create and store different use cases during the 9 months. And if the company that’s filing is about to get a patent, but shouldn't because there’s so much prior art, you can withhold that information and wait until you’re in negotiations with your competitor whose invention could be threatened by the new patent. Knowing what’s being filed, and all the possible risks, gives you a completely different standpoint at the bargaining table. 6. How to use it at scale When filing, companies have 12 months to decide where they want to protect their patents. If a company is about to get a patent, they use the date it was filed at their national patent office to connect it to the US, Japan, China, etc. Invalidating the original patent application means it won’t be granted in other markets. From the day a patent is filed until an intention to grant can take up to 10 years. You need to store information to keep an eye on these changes. A famous wind turbine manufacturer once had patents on a certain technology and competitors waited 10 years before they could file an opposition, meanwhile not knowing if they had the right to sell their product or not. TAKEAWAY Patent monitoring is important at two stages: the moment the patent is published, and the moment it’s about to be granted. The moment to act is during the intention to grant phase. Use your 9-month window wisely. Don't reveal all your cards. If you're about to get a straight flush, save it for future use.

Your organization is probably underutilizing its patent knowledge. Here’s a run-down of 7 business cases that smart patent management can help you solve: 1. Keep track of competitors Patent management serves a two-fold purpose when it comes to tracking competitors. First, you can see what your competitors are doing by watching what patents they’re registering. In fact, you can even enable notifications that tell you when they’ve added a new patent. If you’re a smaller company, there’s a second purpose for competitor tracking: you can watch what directions larger companies are moving in and mirror them. This creates evidence of compatible business strategies and initiatives, positioning you as a great potential acquisition down the road. 2. Avoid creative vacuum Engineers and developers thrive when they’re given a jumping-off point. When your engineers have access to patents, they can look at detailed breakdowns of how other companies are creating and develop ways to build on or improve ideas. There’s nothing more empowering for an engineer than looking at a patent and saying, “They do it like this and I know I can do it better.” 3. Avoid unnecessary reinvention Great inventions aren’t often massive overhauls of existing tools. Lots of innovation is about incremental improvement of existing products. When you don’t look at patents before you start innovating, you wind up reinventing the wheel when, in reality, you could’ve started from a great foundation of pre-existing knowledge. 4. Make data-driven business decisions If your organization needs a tool in order to continue growing, you may start investing in R&D — but this isn’t always the best route. Acquisition, or at least getting a license to use the preexisting tool, is often less expensive than building a solution yourself. 5. Identify new sales opportunities Likewise, if you’ve got a great patent, you can use the database to find businesses who would benefit from it. Instead of wasting time at exhibitions, diving into the database can tell you what companies are trying to build on a tool or invent something like it. Then you’re set up to make a timely and relevant pitch. 6. Enter new markets One obvious way to use the patent database to enter new markets is by checking whether you have the freedom to operate in a certain country. But it’s less common to use it to find compatible companies whose home country is in the market you’re looking to move into. Team up with innovative organizations, share knowledge, and have a partner for entering new markets. 7. Find top talent Patents are a great place to discover innovative engineers and developers. They’re often too occupied to care much about LinkedIn. You have to find them where they are and, if they’re excellent inventors, they’ll be on patents. Pay special attention to names that appear on granted, not pending, patents. That’s a great indication that they’re at the top of their field.

I've seen companies with zero revenue receive seven-figure valuations. Their secret? Good patents. Not everything is about EBITDA, breakeven, cashflow. Sometimes it’s about the technology itself. The first thing young companies want to do is make money. The only thing they care about is having customers who pay for their service/product so they can pay their bills and their employees. Obviously, their number one priority isn’t creating a strong patent portfolio. No one files 1,000 patents hoping to get rich off of it. But, you need to have a strong balance between investing in your product and protecting it. Why hire the best R&D engineers on the market and pay them $8,000 - $10,000 per month for this expertise if you don’t have a strategy to protect their innovations? Not only would it be a massive waste of money, you’d be giving your intellectual property away for free. Here’s the thing a lot of companies either overlook or underestimate: Patents not only create fences around your company’s intellectual property, they also force other companies to negotiate with you if you’ve developed something they want. Here’s how: Let’s say you’re a small company that’s developed groundbreaking technology. If you don’t have a patent, you risk being disrupted or ending up in a lawsuit over freedom to operate. But, if you’re well protected, larger companies will have no choice but to come and talk to you because they’ll realize there’s no workaround without infringing on your patent rights. This opens up the possibility of them licensing your technology, or acquiring you outright. The point is, it will pay dividends to start thinking about valuation of your company in terms of your technology, not just revenue. Large, competitive players in the same field have patent monitoring in their DNA. They’re always monitoring each other and following each other, constantly looking at what patents the other is filing, which exhibitions they’re going to, etc. Small and mid-sized companies have a tendency to file a patent and then ignore it. They don’t keep an eye out for who they’re bothering, who they’re pushing out of the market, and what makes their offering unique. Patents give you undisputed exclusivity. Leverage this by getting the right patent monitoring system in place. It’ll add strategic value to your company.

Patent experts spend 10-20 hours analyzing a single patent. Here is how our AI can do it in minutes. Traditional patent assessment can take hours of intellectual labour: lots of reading, research, interpretation, and back-and-forth between engineers and lawyers. Some patent claims have 40+ pages of description. That’s a great deal of wasted mind power when a machine can do it faster and more accurately. At our customers’ requests, IamIP has tackled this efficiency issue by using AI in its intelligent software to reduce the time spent investigating patents by as much as 90%. Our software can analyze documents, identify the most relevant ones for your business, notify the right user, highlight differences between patents, and do so in the right timeframe: instantly. Once the system has found a specific case of interest, it can translate the patent into a comprehensive technical language that R&D engineers can interpret and understand. Then, engineers can turn this over to lawyers or the legal team to determine whether a certain patent poses a risk or threat, and then involve management to decide on a strategic course of action. The right patent protection can make or break your business. That’s why being one step ahead of your competitors is key. To do this in the patent world, you need technology that gives you an accurate, instantaneous interpretation of a lengthy document in a way that doesn’t leave room for confusion or too much lag time.

If you want accurate patent analysis, stop relying solely on AI tools. Here's the process and team composition you need for strategic patent intelligence: 1. Gather quality data You need to know the quality of data you’re working with. Examine the following: - How the data was collected - Whether you have a full and accurate data set (no data missing) - The assumptions you’re making about that data that might lead you in the wrong direction. Be guided by the garbage in, garbage out principle. 2. Engage a data collection person/tool This person/tool needs to be able to ask all the right questions as a researcher and then find the relevant information. In-house patent engineer, consultant, the IamIP platform, doesn’t matter. Whatever route you choose to go, you need a thorough, accurate, and representative data set. 3. Get R&D engineers to validate patent data Once you have the patent data at hand, you need to involve the business unit and specifically the R&D engineers to confirm the validity and relevancy of these documents from a tech perspective. 4. Map out the data points in correlation with the company’s product/tech Mapping out the data points shouldn’t be left to software. It’s too generic. An engineering team will be able to do it faster and better by simply looking at an image or text of a competitor's patent, reading between the lines, and knowing what the patent is all about. With their 10+ years of experience, they can map out patent data in a way that will help R&D managers visualize the patent landscape and make the data accessible. 5. Do a patent assessment Managers then need to make sure everyone is strategically aligned on freedom to operate, i.e. whether a patent is a development opportunity or a threat. For example if, during this process, you detect 5 patents that could hinder the company from offering its product or services in a certain country, these patents need to be handed over to a patent lawyer to do a patent assessment. Takeaway A proper patent assessment process is fact-based and involves the right people at the right time so that you come to the right conclusions as a company. It not only gives you reliable data on key markets and top countries, it also makes it easier to craft your business strategy and protect your tech.