Deliver business value, but more importantly, put yourself in a position to capture that value. Let your inventors know your intellectual property (IP) and business strategy and involve them early in the game. This way, only the most interesting ideas will mature into disclosure proposals.
The Invention disclosure Module combines process and collaborative functionality, context information such as your historical invention disclosures, and the Enrichment Technology. Let your R&D and IP teams collaborate and progress your ideas to invention disclosures proposals aligned with your business strategy.
The module includes the following features:
Context Information
Enrich ideas with context information such as your organization’ business strategy, prior invention disclosures, patents, etc., to outline the value of ideas when evaluated against different criteria. Enrichment Technology to provide automatic tagging and suggest correlated items and uncover areas of interest as well as hidden patterns.
Social Networking and Collaboration
Share ideas, disclosures, documents, and links. Add comments, and rebound on ideas and disclosures. Automatic suggesting of field experts to improve the quality and potential value of your disclosure proposals.
Reports and Dashboards
Get all the dashboards required to monitor your intellectual property activities and invention disclosures portfolio strategy. Reports can be of different kinds and be generated in different formats.
Process Management
Configure workflows, tasks, and input forms to represent your organization’s invention disclosures management processes. Get notified on the progress of your activities. If applicable, embed mandatory validations and tasks to guarantee that only fully documented disclosures move to the next stage.
Screening, Scoring and Triage
Organize expert reviews, link multiple ideas into one disclosure flow, automatic grouping of ideas and disclosures into clusters to identify key drivers.
Personalization
Configurable Home Page, look & feel and page content personalization.
Roles and User Rights Management
Create different user “roles” with different levels of access and authority to reflect the way your organization really works. Expand your intellectual property programs by adding new roles, or by applying existing roles to a new idea management process.
To prevent market share erosion, a worldwide energy management company has decided to implement an active patenting policy. The company identified significant disconnects between the intellectual property department and the R&D department. As a result, the number of patents filed was insufficient and those that were filed were often misaligned with the business strategy.
Solution:The company has deployed Inova’s Invention Disculosure Module to support a collaborative upstream process involving all R&D engineers worldwide, all patent engineers and all patent program managers. The focus of the process goes from ideation until the invention disclosure stage.
Every single idea is captured in a user friendly form and local patent managers can evaluate and progress the most promising submissions for corporate consideration and patenting.
All patentable ideas are evaluated resulting in a drastic reduction of the number of abandoned filings . The cost of external resources used to produce good invention disclosures was reduced by 30%. More value and revenue from intellectual property can be captured resulting in improved competitiveness.
DISCLOSURE
An invention disclosure, or invention disclosure report, or memo of invention, is a confidential document written by a scientist or engineer for use by a company's patent department, or by an external patent attorney, to determine whether patent protection should be sought for the described invention. Most companies have a patent committee of technical people, intellectual property professionals, and business people, who rate the invention disclosures. Since no innovation is worth anything without a viable business model to commercialize it, R&D and IP teams have to collaborate to integrate intellectual property into technology generation as early as possible to strengthen patent decision-making and portfolio alignment.
