There are many IP management tools in the market. I am not talking about IP management tools for Patent Attorneys. These are more complicated systems, and contain many details for the patent registration process such as Office Actions, IDS items, and many more. I am talking about commercial firms, academic institutions or health care organizations that have vast amount of IP and require an internal tool to manage it.
Such tools are needed in order to manage the entire process from invention evaluation step till the IP is commercialized (either by licensing or trading). We at App4Reg developed our own IP management tool which is suitable for such organizations, but this article is not about selling our IP management tool.
During our work with our clients we found that the one of the most tiring routine in large scale organizations is to filter the new inventions for evaluation. The most common practice is a form, usually found in the IP department on the firm’s intranet. Each employee who has an idea for an invention downloads the form and prints it. Another option is to fill it on the computer (whether this is an MS word template for example). In any case, the filled form is sent to the IP Manager or to the Technology Transfer Officer (TTO) for review. Once the form is reviewed, a project is created in the IP Management system. Now this is what we found to be redundant and time consuming. Not to mention those were denied and will never be counted at the statistics.
So, why inventors have to fill forms in one way and TTOs need to insert (the same data in most cases) in another way? We believe that once data is inserted once, it should be copied automatically (through authorized user of course) to the organization management tools.
Our solution to this situation is an online form, resides at the organization intranet or cloud. The form is built easily in case your IT is capable of creating such online forms. The new invention form is reviewed in an online manner by the TTO. The TTO can edit the form, and in one click to export it directly into the IP Management System. There are many advantages for using an online form:
- Time saving for TTOs to handle new inventions registration
- Avoid difficulties for unclear handwriting
- In case an inventor (employee) exists in the system, his details don’t need to be inserted again
- Avoid emails, fax, scanners and other time consuming facilities
- New inventions are saved in a repository for offline analysis (reports, trends, statistics etc.)
App4Reg’s Patent Inventory & Trading solution, which is our IP Management tool, supports importing new invention structure from online forms. Other IP Management tools can create an API (Application Programming Interface) to be used for the export. The online forms should be flexible and may be expanded to include more details. These forms should be accessible via intranet or an external URL in case the organization doesn’t want the forms to be saved internally. All options are available, and building such a form, as well as incorporating it into the internal systems can be done easily and improve the organization efficiency.
Automating your Action is more than a buzzword. It is a way of thinking.
Manual work is expensive, time consuming, error sensitive and frustrating.
