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My Gift to You: Free (or almost free) Patent Searching and Analysis Tools

Happy Holidays everyone!  I woke up this morning to the Christmas sunrise over Miami Beach on Christmas morning.  Having grown up in this town--where Christmas means a trip to the beach, not the joy of new ice skates--I am feeling a whole lot of holiday spirit.  This made me realize that I have been meaning to respond to some inquiries folks have made about patent searching tools that I use in my daily IP Strategy work.   Since most of these are free (or almost) free, consider this your holiday gift from me! I hear it now:  "Free?  Did she say free?  But, such and such company wants to charge me $1500 a month, which is a much better deal than my lawyers charge me for monitoring patents in my business space on an ongoing basis.  And, this consultant offered to do a whitespace analysis that would solve all my innovation

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Patent “Expert” Opinion on Reasons for Google Tender Offer for Groupon Reveals Fundamental Problems with IP Professionals

After several years of writing about how business leaders need to wrest control of their IP matters from lawyers, today brought a revelation that illuminated why this seems to be such a hard point to get across.  It should be a no brainer:  it has been shown time and time again that when a company aligns its IP strategy with its business strategy, value creation opportunities abound.  So, why is it so hard to get business people to sign onto something that is unquestionably in the best interests of their shareholders?  It's simple--patent experts wholly lack credibility with business people on these issues.  This lack of credibility is compounded by the fact that these experts are given a forum to trumpet these views through use of their firms' large marketing budgets, as well as by haphazard journalists who give them a forum to expound their self-interested views without counterpoint. To this

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How Patent Whitespace Analysis Can Set a Company Up for Sustainable Failure

I spent a few days last week at the Innovation Cubed Conference in Orlando.  While there, I heard two instances of use of a term that I absolutely hate, at least when it is used by innovation professionals to define in some manner the innovation processes of their respective organizations.   This word is:

PATENT WHITESPACE ANALYSIS

Not only do I hate this phrase, I think that companies that utilize patent (or IP) whitespace analysis to define their product and technology development pathways are quite possibly setting themselves up for failure.  And, it's bad enough that a single innovation project might fail as a result of the faulty data inputs that can occur from relying on whitespace assessments, but I think that most corporate processes incorporating patent whitespace analysis are based upon faulty methodology, thus setting the organization up for sustainable failure. For the uninitiated, when applied to the patent world,