New Podcast: Winning with Patents (and IP)

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

Season 1 of my new Winning with Patents (and IP) podcast is live. Six episodes are up on Spotify and Anchor.fm. In this season, I provide listeners with insights gained over my almost 25 years of experience in IP litigation, patent prosecution, licensing, innovation management, and startup counseling. Instead of talking about how obtain patents and IP, I provide actionable guidance on how your business can generate value from patents and IP. Moreover, I show how innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders can virtually guarantee that patents and IP that they generate will be aligned with their desired business outcomes.

In coming weeks, I will provide the transcript of each episode, so check back or subscribe here. In the meantime, reach out directly if you'd like to learn more about how to generate patents and IP that move the needle on the value

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Patent Expertise: Are You Selecting the Right Type?

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

There's an army of patent experts to choose from. Are you selecting the right one?

Companies looking for valuable patents should reconsider whether technical credentials are the best way to select a lawyer. Patents should be viewed as business documents first if the goal is to protect valuable innovation investment. When you engage a patent professional based on technical skills, you may end up with what I call the "mind-meld" that follows from two teams that share the same expertise. While the lawyer will bring legal skills that the client's technical team does not possess, it can be said that the overlap of skills not only makes one of the persons redundant, the commonality of interests often silos the effort in the technical aspects of the effort.

Notably, customers select a product because it

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Up Your Patent Game with a Referee

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

When two teams are working for opposite goals, a referee can make sure the game is played by the rules.

One-hundred % of patents make money for their lawyers, but very few--some estimates say 5% or fewer--make money for their owners. This disconnect is striking when you say it out loud, but few seem to recognize that it exists. Perhaps this is because it works very well for the "Patent Industrial Complex."

To this end, every intellectual property law firm has bills to pay, appearances to maintain, and risks to mitigate. This can certainly be tough to see when one is working to grow a successful legal practice, as I did in an earlier part of my career, but the thought did arise from time to time. A well-known IP lawyer I worked used

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Better Patent Referrals: Tips for Non-Specialists

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

When seeking information about patents, clients often ask their business lawyers or their personal friends for referrals. However, just knowing a patent lawyer personally or by reputation should not be the reason that a referral to a lawyer is made—even if the person making the referral has a law degree. Patents can be critical for business success and, for some clients, specialized expertise is required to ensure the right result is obtained. In this regard, many clients need not just a patent, but a patent that creates business value for their company. Notably, this objective requires a keen business insight, something that is not in the wheelhouse of many otherwise competent patent practitioners. There are questions that a non-specialist can ask before she makes a referral to help her clients and friends meet their patent goals.

As an IP

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Enhancing Patent Outcomes: Designing Applications for Allowance

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

We all know the patent application process can cost $20,000 or more — and often much more. This alone should give those of us who obtain patents reason to pause and consider how we can and should do better relative to generating patent strategies for clients. Some of my peers will say that patent protection has more hurdles to overcome and requirements to meet today than in years past, and this contributes to the high cost. Certainly, this is true, but merely shrugging our shoulders and saying something akin to “I’m doing the best I can under the circumstances” is not a satisfactory option for clients who are relying on patent protection to enhance the value of their businesses. Instead, it is necessary to try something other than status quo patent strategies with a goal of getting better results for our clients.

While I

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Better Patent Services for Innovators: Patentability Reviews

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

For the past 12 years as an IP Strategist, I’ve worked exclusively with clients engaged in developing and delivering innovative products to consumers. From this unique vantage-point, I think it’s time for some entrenched patentability assessment practices to be retooled for innovators. I’ve come to this conclusion because many of the ingrained patent application development processes in my profession consistently fail to properly address the non-standard nature of innovators’ products and technology when assessing the scope of patent protection that can, and should, be recommended to help these risk-takers extract maximum value from their efforts.

An example of how strategic IP-thinking differs from that of traditional patent attorney processes is that I believe the unique nature of an innovative product or technology itself should serve as the focal point of any patent protection strategy. Presumably, the identification of an unmet need in the market

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Patenting for the Future: A New Approach for Innovators

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

The traditional patent model is configured to generate protection for an already completed invention. This, by definition, is a backward-looking approach and begs the question of why people are protecting what they have done in the past, when patents are supposed to be about protecting their future. Because strategy is about defining a desired outcome and working backward, an IP Strategist like me necessarily works with clients to identify why they are seeking patent protection in the first place. Only then do we develop a plan to achieve that business goal.

Experience shows that such forward-thinking strategies help innovators stay one step ahead of competitors by enhancing their ability to protect future revenue streams that are expected to occur with the introduction of innovative new products. When developing new products that customers will pay for in significant volumes, these innovators must “make it cheaper to go through them then around them. To do this requires a

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Creating Business Value with Customer-Directed Patent Strategy

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

When you think about patents, you probably first consider who should be hired to protect ideas from competitors. When I think about patents, I think about what should be protected, and how it can be done efficiently and effectively. Unless you have this nailed down first, it doesn’t matter who you hire to help you, the end product will likely fall short of your goals.

In this regard, I’m more concerned about the client’s innovation story and how patentable concepts will benefit her customers. In short, I believe it is the customers we should focus on protecting, not just the product we are selling to them. While a bit more effort may be needed on the front end with this approach, my experience shows that taking a collaborative (and creative) approach to patenting allows my clients to generate strong protection more quickly, and at

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How Companies Can Hit the Mark with Patents

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

As an IP Strategist, I’ve questioned time and time again why most patents fail to deliver the intended effect of bolstering long-term profits for their owners. I’ve concluded that too many patents read like diagrams intended for assembling products from separate pieces. This effectively means that the patenting process focused more on the structure of the product and not the functionality delivered. This is the opposite to what one needs to do: the customer buys the product’s function, not the structure. If you keep thinking and using the same ineffective patent strategies, you’re going to get the same results! I suggest you begin to think about patents from a different perspective to achieve the kind of success your company’s stakeholders will appreciate in today’s competitive market.

My approach to patents is different. Together with my client, we create patent protection directed to enhancing long-term profits to be generated by a company that successfully brings

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Why So Many Patents Fail to Generate Expected Business Value and How to Fix the Problem

by Jackie Hutter, IP Strategist

It’s not uncommon for me as an IP Strategist with over 20 years of experience to be contacted to provide a second opinion on a company’s patent portfolio. This generally occurs when clients aren’t totally satisfied with previous patenting activities because their attorneys failed to follow through on promises that their efforts would create meaningful business results. It’s typically easy for me to identify the mismatches between patents and value creation because I was an in-house IP lawyer for years after spending my early career at law firms. While in a law firm every patent had value to me because that was my business, in the corporate setting I learned quickly to focus on obtaining patents that mattered to the business. Emphasizing this perspective required me to ensure future patented revenue streams for my company—which was my only client--were well protected, as opposed to generating broad patents for many clients irrespective of the business goals of each of these clients,

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