IP.com has sponsored this post.

When an engineer comes up with a great idea for an invention, there’s a whole slew of questions that spring to mind:

• How should I approach the design?
• What materials and/or methods should I use?
• What will it take for me to produce a prototype?
• How will I this scale into volume production?

And, perhaps most commonly: 

• Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

The answers to those other questions will vary widely depending on your industry and application, but that last question almost immediately prompts this response:

• Are you sure that no one has?

Intellectual Property and Engineering

Welcome to the wonderful world of intellectual property (IP)—and all the legal stuff that can hinder an engineer’s progress, safeguard their hard work against unscrupulous copycats, or sometimes both.

While there aren’t a lot of engineers out there with law degrees, any engineer who has a new idea, or is improving on an existing solution, will still have to deal with IP in one way or another to ensure that they’re not reinventing the wheel—or worse, be liable for patent infringement.

“One of the things that’s surprising when it comes to intellectual property is that, when you’re developing a solution for one problem, it might actually apply in an entirely different area of engineering,” noted Sam Baxter, CTO of IP.com.

This is particularly true in the case of software engineering, where an algorithm or piece of code can apply far beyond its original intention. A recent AI system designed to distinguish different kinds of pastry turned out to be equally capable of identifying cancerous tumors, calling into question whether a once fundamental criteria for patentable technology (uniqueness) still applies.

“I think if you put a couple of patent lawyers in a room, they would talk about it [uniqueness] differently than the way a couple of software engineers would,” Baxter said. “Engineers like myself find certain aspects of patenting curious because the bar is about obviousness and software engineers tend to think that as long as they’re given a problem, they can solve it. But that flies in the face of the way patents are granted, where what matters is who solved the problem first.”

Baxter cited Amazon’s 1-Click patent as an example: although engineers saw it as an obvious solution to a known problem, no one had actually done it before -- and that’s what mattered from the perspective of patent law. Amazon filed the 1-Click patent in 1997 and it was granted by the USPTO in 1999.

Improving the Patent Process

Making IP more accessible benefits everyone—holders and applicants alike—but doing so is no simple task. IP.com has been developing its proprietary natural language processing engine, Semantic Gist, since 1994 in an effort to combine hundreds of millions of data points from corporate and legal records and create a tool that can help engineers, IP teams and their employers evaluate, protect and monetize their ideas.

Its Semantic Search platform, called InnovationQ Plus, is the only patent search tool that features exclusive, fully discoverable content from IEEE, including full-text journals and conference papers alongside one of the largest global patent databases in the industry. IEEE is the most up-to-date source of scientific and technical literature in the world and is cited three times more than any other technical source during patent prosecution.

Translating Patents and Dealing with Jargon

As anyone who’s worked for a global organization knows, translation can present a huge barrier to productivity. Even if your patent includes a lot of quantitative information, the description of the problem your invention is intended to solve will inherently be at least partially qualitative. Baxter suggests that this often hinders innovation among engineers.

“English might be the language of business but it’s not the language of thought or expression for many, many people,” he said. “Having a method of showing non-English users how to access patent information in a way that makes sense to them holds a lot of promise for unlocking innovation, and is at the heart of our solutions.”

Typically, the way the patent process works involves engineers turning their descriptions over to lawyers, who supplement those descriptions with the appropriate legal terminology. Of course, just as most engineers don’t have law degrees, most lawyers don’t have engineering degrees, which can be an issue when it comes to dealing with technical jargon.

“It would really benefit us to be able to communicate better with our peers—who may speak a different language—as well as the lawyers, by understanding local jargon,” Baxter said. In this context, “local jargon” often means “local to the company filing the patent” and so engineers working for different organizations—even within the same industry—may have difficulties understanding one another.

“In my experience with large companies, you never know what anyone’s talking about until you’ve worked there for a while,” Baxter noted. “A worldwide patent database can help inform inventors on what is local jargon and what isn’t.” He cited the term ‘Frunk’ – a front trunk – which is understandable to the automotive engineer without explanation, but might likely be unclear to the IP lawyer without some explanation.

IP.com has addressed this challenge with the release of IQ Inventor’s Aide, which guides an engineer through drafting a strong disclosure and also scores the idea for novelty. Submitting concise and clear invention disclosures removes friction points in the innovation process. IQ Inventor’s Aide helps weed through ideas, so that inventors submit truly novel ideas for review.  This increases efficiency, reduces cost and shortens the feedback cycle from IP teams to inventors.

“The process in the past was this,” explained Baxter, “Hey, I have a great idea: I have this three-year-old car and I’m driving it around and when it starts raining, the windshield wipers should just come on automatically.”

“Of course,” he added, “it might never occur to me, not having a brand-new car, that this already exists. Being able to describe to a computer what I think I’ve invented and have the software system tell me quickly and completely, ‘No, you didn’t invent that.’ That saves me time and increases efficiency along the entire innovation process.”

That’s at the individual level. At the corporate level, the legal lifting gets a lot heavier. Baxter cited IBM as one of the most prolific patent holders in the U.S., with roughly 9,000 patents granted each year.

“You can assume they probably applied for at least twice that number of patents,” he said. “Now, if you think about how many ideas they had to write down, it’s probably 10 disclosures for every patent application. So, you can end up with something like 200,000 disclosures that all need to be funneled through lawyers, which can slow the whole process down. Our tools help engineers write clear, complete disclosures – free of jargon – to enable faster review and response times from IP teams to inventors.”

By creating a semantic search engine specifically for patents, IP.com makes understanding intellectual property much simpler and finding relevant art and patent data more accessible to engineers. This improves the turnaround time for filing a patent and also saves engineers from unintentionally reinventing the wheel, especially given the diverse ways in which patented software can be used.

Accelerating Innovation

The cycle time between a patent review committee looking at a disclosure and an engineer getting it back can sometimes take weeks. IQ Ideas Plus shortens the cycle time, drives efficiencies and reduces a lot of frustration on both ends of the equation. Moving more complete disclosures through the system improves the grant rate of the applications because the tool has helped document necessary legwork during the process.

“IQ Ideas Plus does a great job of both helping find novel solutions using the brainstorming modules, and then analyzing those new ideas using the Inventor’s Aide module,” Baxter said.

Baxter argues that this really benefits both sides of the invention process—product development engineers and IP teams. For the engineers, filing invention disclosures can be a burdensome task. For the patent review committees or IP Counsel, getting clear, concise disclosures, free of jargon and acronyms and complete with documentation of prior art attached, makes the review faster and more efficient. IQ Ideas Plus enables faster idea generation and collaboration, more complete documents for submission and review so the best ideas surface faster allowing great ideas to get to market faster.

Learn more at IP.com.