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| Have you built a better mousetrap? If so, you need to figure out how to sell it before you patent it. |
People
are unquestionably ingenious and many believe that such ingenuity can lead to
great financial rewards. Indeed, most of
us have heard our entire lives that “if you build a better mousetrap and the
world will beat a path to your door”.
This combination motivates countless people each year to expend the time,
effort and money needed to file and obtain a US patent on their idea. In recent times, the number of patents filed yearly
has approached 400K, with about 20% of these estimated to be filed by small
businesses (as this term is defined by the Small Business Administration) and
individual inventors.
As a
highly experienced patent attorney, I have benefited greatly from the perceived
need to protect innovative ideas with patents.
But after years of writing patent applications that created little to no
business value for my clients, I have decided that at this stage of my career I
will only take on patent matters that are a critical aspect of capturing a
significant aspect of the value available in a well thought out and executable
business plan. In other words, in my
role as co-founder of the Lean Legal Team of Michael / Hutter, I will only
obtain patents for clients if there is a realizable opportunity to make money
from the innovation.
What do
I mean by realizable business opportunity? First and foremost,
licensing is not one such opportunity. While a strong majority of inventors believe that they can license their
idea upon obtaining a patent, the reality is that almost no patents are ever
licensed when the sole aspect of the license is the patent itself. Certainly, there is much press activity addressing
the problem of “patent trolls,” the patents that are suitable for “trolling”
only comprise a small minority of the total number of patents in force
today. Notably, however, the reason that
such patents ever get licensed is that an existing or soon to exist business
model infringes the patent owned by the “troll,” and the license is entered into
to avoid litigation.
