Whether you work for a large company or on the ground floor of a small startup, you’re probably coming up with new ideas for solving everyday problems. But how do you know when one of those ideas is good, and how do you protect your invention?
There is a legal process for filing a patent, but there is also a roadmap for creating something patent-worthy — one that begins well before the first brainstorming session.
I’ve spent most of my career inventing. For over 25 years, I’ve worked on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and have over 100 related patents. I also lead a team of problem solvers and innovators at Cisco that creates game-changing solutions for the future. Our team’s charter is to always be state-of-the-art in security and collaboration. Inventing is just part of the job, so creating an environment that allows that process to thrive is essential.
Before Getting Started:
Why Are Patents Important?
For companies, patents offer protection from others stealing ideas. A well-stacked patent portfolio also lets companies like Cisco, for example, trade patents with other companies so that we can keep innovating and building great products based on the best ideas out there.
Patents make the technology ecosystem work. They allow small companies to compete with larger ones.
And for the individual? If you have a patent on your resume (especially if you’re not an engineer), you’re a stand-out before you even get an interview.
How To Patent an Invention:
Step 1: Create Space for Ideas, Good and Bad
Nothing starts as a good idea. Every idea is born a bad one that becomes better over time. So, creating a culture where bad ideas aren’t automatically killed but have room to evolve and transform is paramount.
The key to creating this culture is ensuring all team members believe they are inventors. In my experience, no one believes or thinks that non-engineers on my team assume that you must be an engineer to invent something. The junior engineers think you must be very senior to go through the process. Meanwhile, those senior engineers often think that the entrepreneurial types are more likely to have new ideas worth patenting.
We are all inventors. If you have a problem to solve and you’re thinking about a way to solve it, you’re an inventor.
Encourage the more senior members of your team, particularly those who have already gone through the inventing/patenting process, to keep an eye open for other team members who are trying to invent something or who want to join discussions about ways to solve problems. If they hear a patentable idea, they can encourage that person to follow it.
Step 2: Come Up With a Good Idea
Often, people devise a problem and imagine a “machine” that could solve it. That’s not an invention; it’s a wish, and a wish is just half of the problem. Creating a well-stated problem is the hardest part of the inventing process. But after that, finding the solution becomes easy.
Once you’ve defined your problem, encourage brainstorming to solve it. Get different people in one room, and they’ll all contribute ideas to the solution. (Those who come up with the different parts of the concept will eventually be the authors on the patent. To be an inventor, you must not just be in the room when it happens.)
If you’re coming up with ideas but nothing seems to work, consider different techniques used in your field, and think about how to combine those techniques. Very often, combining two different techniques to solve a problem is patentable. It’s hard to know why, but that thinking usually yields reasonable solutions. You’ll probably have some ideas if you start thinking that way when brainstorming an hour later.
Step 3: Turn a Good Idea into a Patentable One
You have an idea, but it has to be good and new. When you first look at it, it might appear to have been done before.
But look again: Is your idea using something in a new way or a new context? Maybe you’re combining it with another technique, which makes it new. Take your broad idea and narrow it down — getting as specific as possible. In what exact way is your idea new?
Once you’ve narrowed down your idea, it’s time to ask: Will others use it?
If no one else in the world but you will want to use your patent, or if there’s another solution that everyone already uses that is equally good, then your patent doesn’t give you any protection. People will just use the other idea.
This brings me to another point. People often think they need to patent all their ideas. That’s not necessarily true. You need to patent the idea that other people might want to use and that you want to own. If someone uses it, you’ll want them to license your rights.
Once you know your basic idea is good and new, and you know that others will use it, take that basic, specific idea that you’ve narrowed down, and then generalize back up: Think about all the variants of that idea, because what you want to do when you create a patent is create market covers multiple use cases.
For example, say you’ve built something that could work on an IP network. You might ask yourself, could this also work over a wireless or Bluetooth network? Often, the answer is yes. So, generalize your idea to include those scenarios.
Success Story Time:
One non-technical member of my team was utterly convinced she would never have a patent. One day, our team was trying to solve a complex problem. While she wasn’t an engineer, she cared about solving the problem and knew she was in a safe space to share an idea. So she did, and her idea was a good one.
I told her, “Hey, you know that is patentable, right?” She was skeptical, but she eventually obtained a patent for it.
Not only did she help solve a problem and provide Cisco with an idea worth protecting, but she also set herself apart for future success.
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