Six Ways to Get Better at Recognizing Inventions
One of the fun, and often frustrating, aspects of working with intellectual property and the creators of it is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to recognizing inventions in every technical area or in every commercial situation. And to make invention recognition even more challenging, it can be as much an art as it is a science. Given this, the best way to get better at recognizing inventions is to actively work at it many times in many different areas with many different people. Fortunately, every person and every company can broaden their view as to what might be an invention, improve their skills in recognizing their inventions and, as a direct result, improve their personal and commercial success, as well as the return on investment in time, money and other resources that they make.
Here are just six of the many ways to think about and get better at recognizing your inventions.
1. Understand the problems. How broad and how deep are your understandings of the problems to be solved and the challenges to be addressed? Regardless of whether you take a design thinking or other approach, digging deep to understand the full nature and root causes of the problems and challenges is a critical part of recognizing your inventions. Keep asking why, why, why, why and why. If the problem is that a manufacturing process is not quick enough, ask why. If the answer is that it takes too long for an ingredient to be mixed, ask why. If the answer is that the ingredient’s starting particle size is too large, ask why. And so on and so on…. If the problem is that a product is too expensive, ask why. If the answer is that the product’s design is too complicated, ask why. If the answer is that the complicated design is a result of the physical demands on the product during operation and use, ask why. And so and so on…. Settling for an initial problem statement, and an initial answer to that problem statement, often stops the deeper analysis into what the root problems really are and how they can be examined, better understood, and ultimately solved, thereby limiting the full recognition of the resulting inventions that mitigate and perhaps eliminate the problems. Also, don’t forget that understanding the true problem may itself be the key to invention, even if the solution to the problem is easy to identify or implement once the true problem is known.
2. Understand the gaps. How are the needs and preferences of your customers, the market, the industry, etc. being left unmet? What new regulatory requirements, supply shortfalls, and shortcomings in current technology, manufacturing processes, and product offerings are you facing? What features and advances are present in your competitors’ current offerings, or are expected in their new offerings that you do not currently provide? How you are addressing and filling these gaps almost always leads to new inventions, so make sure you look at your solutions in the full and relevant contexts to better recognize the inventions entrenched in your solutions.
3. Understand the risks. How are you planning to work with a supplier that also supplies products and services to your competitors? The specific requirements and information that you provide to your supplier may result in the supplier incorporating any resulting benefits in other products and services provided to other parties, including your competitors. Don’t ever assume that a non-disclosure agreement will avoid this problem. How are you planning to work with a potential partner so that you don’t educate the partner to an extent where the partner no longer needs you? How are you going to work with a consultant so that you can use the consultant’s deliverables without creating a long-term reliance on the consultant? As you consider these commercial risks, along with the opportunities that inspired them, more risks likely will be identified, along with inventions that may help mitigate these risks and drive further opportunities.
4. Understand the findings. How are your product and service offerings evolving, and why? What tests have you done, what surveys have you conducted, what feedback have you gotten, and what changes and additions to your offerings have you implemented as a result? What has a lean methodology, if used, highlighted for you and helped you determine a product evolution path? What have you learned from the solutions that didn’t work or that didn’t work as well as another solution? As your offerings and solutions evolve, don’t forget that the intermediate learning and the solutions not implemented may be inventive or have inventive aspects even if they are not optimal for technical, commercial, cost or other reasons. A good invention recognition approach involves looking at all inventions arising from the investments you have made in your development processes and projects, not just the final implemented versions of them.
5. Understand the adjacencies. How can your technologies, products, services and core strengths be used in other areas outside your current primary commercial focus and technical development priorities? What would it take to modify them to be more applicable in these adjacent areas? Any such additions or modifications may give rise to new inventions. While this analysis is not intended to drive a change in your commercial strategy, or to create a loss of focus in the implementation of your commercial strategy, this type of analysis may find further avenues to drive a more robust intellectual property strategy and to increase your return on the investments you are already making.
6. Understand the tools. How are the many processes and other tools being used to analyze, improve and approve your products, services, product and service development, and market focus areas? There are many processes and other tools that might get used, such as those involving agile, lean, design thinking, storyboarding, Pareto analysis, stage gates, TRIZ, SWOT, De Bono hats, six-sigma, morphological analysis, reverse engineering, open innovation, crowdsourcing, systematic inventive thinking (SIT), SCAMPER, and other techniques. Each tool has steps, each of which will provide insights that can lead to inventions, and different people in different functional roles often are involved in the different steps. Thus, understanding the steps in the tools, and collaborating with the players at each of the steps, is critical to getting the insights that lead to invention recognition.
While the six areas discussed above overlap, they each bring a different way of thinking to recognizing inventions. Invention recognition requires a full understanding of the problems to be solved and deep thinking about technology, competitors, suppliers, partners, failures, offering evolution, commercial strategy and many other things through many different lenses. Only when this is done well and often is a great invention recognition process in place.
Happy hunting!
