TKS Session 6: Patent Sprint
This is the first session after the Ignition Challenge, where we are now looking into other tools and tech in preparation for our demo day coming up soon. These next few sessions are mainly about learning and broadening your skills while you work on your projects and make progress there. More challenges like XPRIZE won’t start up until the new year.
In this session, we focused on learning about patents, what they are, how they work, and when/why to get a patent for your work. This session was especially relevant to the work we are doing for ClotGuard right now, so the timing for this was really good. This session was mainly just about developing the skill of reading and looking for patents. So, instead of a MotW, we had a TKSkill for this session.
We started by doing a deep dive into the world of patents. So, I’ll give a short overview of the info we learned about patents.
Patents are a way to protect your property from being stolen or used by someone else. There are different kinds of patents someone can apply for. For example, there are patents for trademarking, meaning you can use that kind of patent to protect the name of your company. Another commonly applied for patent is one that protects your ideas/inventions.
There are a few reasons why someone would apply for a patent. The main reason is that it allows you to safely share your work with the public to help them understand what you’re working on and bring more traction to your work/business. When you share your idea with the public and it has a patent, this prevents anyone from copying your work and using it/passing it off as their own. Some companies just build up patents for all the tech and products they develop to be as generic as possible, so no one can in any way use the stuff they developed or even modify it. That way, these companies hold full ownership of all their innovations and can easily sue anyone who tries to improve upon/modify their work. Some people may choose to patent a specific step or feature in the design of their product. This technically allows someone to recreate everything up to a specific step that the person had patented. That step may be what makes the product work or the key differentiator that puts them ahead of their competitors.
You can’t just patent anything. There are a few main requirements when it comes to figuring out if you’re eligible to patent. There are three main requirements that your application must satisfy in order to be eligible for a patent. The three are:
New: it must be new and not already disclosed to the public in any form before the patent is filed
Useful: it must serve a purpose, be practical, and functional
Non-Obvious: it can’t be an obvious improvement on existing technology to someone with the average skillset in that field
We went over the reasons some people would/wouldn’t choose to file a patent. It’s smart to apply for a patent once you’ve finished the development/engineering of your invention or idea. Because, if you patent really early in the development stage, there is a chance that you may change your product completely with features or methods that you’re old patent doesn’t cover, making the patent essentially useless. And, patents are really expensive, so it’s not smart to patent an idea early on until you’re ready to reveal it to the public and the final product is refined.
We lastly went over a short overview of a patent timeline. Patents take roughly 2-3 years to secure, so you need to make sure the product is ready to patent and that you have the money for it.
Now, to practice understanding patents, we did a patent search activity. So, what we did was choose an idea or topic that we are working on, whether for your focus or project work, and then we went to different patent sites and searched for patents by using the keywords that relate to the project or focus area we are looking in. For the patent activity, I looked into patents that may be similar to what we are developing at ClotGuard. We would put in keywords that describe what ClotGuard is into patent databases like Google Patents, and then see what inventions that have already been patented come up. Patent databases are online databases where anyone can look up patents that have been filed. Patent databases exist to help people who want to patent an idea to research what’s out there to make sure no one has patented the invention or something really similar yet.
We took note of the top 5 patents that we found that were most relevant to what we were developing at ClotGuard. What’s good for us is that we found that there wasn’t anything similar to what we were developing at CLotGuard, so this kind of tells us that what we are developing is novel or non-obvious.
That was it for the session. It was very skill-based and focused on developing knowledge around patents, which is a very important skill set to have when developing new products or inventions. It was a very useful and eye-opening session, especially since we tailored it to our ClotGuard work, and I definitely learned a lot.
