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Intellectual Property Strategy
WDC PATENTS, LLC || 858-254-8210 || INFO@WDCPATENTS.COM
WDC Patents can help you craft and implement a comprehensive intellectual property strategy. Contact us when you want to discuss your situation.
What is an intellectual property strategy?
Does my company need one?
What is an intellectual property strategy? This includes your strategy for developing your own company's intellectual property and for dealing with that of others. The overarching strategy should encompass patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and other control points that can give your business a sustainable advantage.
Does my company need one? Probably. If you have competitors and a need to differentiate yourself, it is probably worth investing in a strategy.
How can WDC Patents help? With your inputs and approval, Win Childers will craft an intellectual property strategy that takes into account the unique control points and competitive landscape affecting your business. Win crafted and implemented such strategies for Hewlett Packard for consumer, commercial, and industrial printing. He also advanced patent strategies for new business endeavors including life sciences, digital displays, and fuel cells. Every one of these business required a unique approach relative to the others.
What is needed to get started? First it would be good for you to assemble information surrounding business factors and technology factors related to your business (see below). Then contact us. We can give you a initial assessment at no charge.
Business Factors:
- Business Model: How do you generate revenue? What assures profitability?
- Competitors: Who are your likely competitors? What are your advantages?
- Direction: How is the business landscape changing? How will this affect doing business?
- Regulations: Are you affected by government regulations? How are these changing?
Technology Factors:
- Technology: What are your technology strengths?
- Competitive Technology: How does your technology compare with competing approaches?
- Patents Landscape: What can we learn from related patents?
- New Technologies: How might new technologies affect your products? Your competitors?
When the above questions are well understood, an intellectual property strategy can be defined. The following are some elements of a complete strategy.
Protecting Nearer Term Core Business: The classic approach focuses on protecting the core business model against replication. If your company has a key product, patents need to be generated that prevent knockoffs and design-around activity. Protecting against product knockoffs can be accomplished with relatively specific patent claims. On the other hand, protecting against design equivalents is more challenging. To do this, we need to map out a space of possible design equivalents and then how much of that space we can protect with claim breadth and targeting specific design alternatives. This needs to take into account the competitive and patent landscape.
Protecting Technology: This is very similar to protecting core business but the focus is on technology platforms rather than products. A technology platform patent may cover multiple product lines and hence may be broader than a product-specific patent. On the other hand, product-specific patents may be more effective against knockoffs.
Protecting Processes: Patents focused on process sequences are often employed when the protection sought is related to business methods or software.
Anticipating Future Trends & Future License Revenue: Beyond nearer term core business are technology and business trends that will affect your industry and technology landscape. One process that WDC patents offers is targeted innovation. This is a process used to generate patents that anticipate changes that result from these trends. Such patents are particularly useful in gaining future licensing leverage.
Addressing Competitive Threats: The patent strategy needs to specifically address key competitors in terms of their competitive offerings and patent portfolios. We can consider targeted innovation that anticipates the trajectory of your key competitor.