BizMorph

The Patent Minefield

One of my clients supplied this metaphor.  He suggested that a patent search is like exploring for gold in a minefield.   

An inventor can only patent that art which has not already been patented or disclosed by someone else.   If the inventor files a patent application without a proper prior art search he risks "stepping on a mine",  that is his patent application may be denied by the patent office examiners because it was "taught by the prior art",  that other patent that he was unaware of.   Worse, even if the patent is granted, due to ignorance of prior art, someone may come out of the woodwork , sometimes years later and sue the inventor for infringing their patent.

 

There are actually individuals and companies (called Patent Trolls by some) who actively employ a strategy of filing patents they never intend to commercialize but hope eventually to use in a lawsuit against someone else.

At BML our job is to search that minefield and put flags on the locations of the mines.   That way the inventor can adjust his patent application to cover the most   "gold bearing" territory as possible without stepping on one of those prior art patents. 

We start by determining the territory that is covered by the clients invention by preparing a "Search Profile"  --This tells us where to look in the online patent databases for prior art which is close to the clients invention.   Sometimes we find a patent directly atop the invention.  Then we can issue a "High Flash"  email warning to the inventor to beware.  The inventor can then adjust his patent or drop it all together.  Depending on where we are in the job he can receive a store credit or save 75% of the search cost.

There is an increasing trend today to save money by not doing a patent search, arguing that the patent office will do it anyway.  That is an very  risky strategy as the inventor may spend a substantial amount of money on a patent application and on "office actions"  with the patent office before giving up or extremely restricting his patent due to prior art he would have known about if he had ordered a search to be done.

Re-Inventing The Wheel

I often have to explain to clients how the patent claim system works. I’ve found this illustration useful and I hope that you will too.

Suppose you had invented a bicycle wheel like the one shown here.

However you had never seen another wheel and therefore in your claims you described the wheel concept itself as your invention, hoping to own all kinds of wheels.

However, in a prior art search like we perform at BML, one of the first patents we uncovered was a wheel like this one.

Okay—you cant own the wheel, but this wheel has no spokes, rim or tires. Perhaps we can change our claims to a spoked wheel with a tire.

 

Unfortunately, the next patent turned up by the search is a spoked wheel like the one below. However this wheel has no tire. It has a metal rim.

Now we are down to looking for a wheel that has a tire on it.  Like the next piece of prior art we found


.

 

This patent looks really close. But it has a hard rubber tire. So in the end we are left  with a patent on a baloon tire.  This is what a patent search does.  It helps you refine the claims to  cover only what you have invented that  is novel. 

If you were to submit your patent application with the broader claims you would have suffered successive rejections by the patent office.  Each rejection costing you in time and money to respond to "office actions".

That is the value of a good  patent search.  It saves you time and money by making sure your patent is  something that  meets the patent ability crieria and can be defended  in an office action.

 

 

 

 

Exploiting Opportunities

Every business has opportunities it doesn’t exploit. Sometimes they are just ideas that pass quickly through someone’s head and other times they are complex concepts which have been thoroughly studied and then for some reason or another end up on the shelf gathering dust. 

It’s not hard to see why this happens. Most of the time in business, we are consumed with the everyday issues of finding and satisfying customers. At BML we call those activities “The Business Comfort Zone” or Quadrant One. 

The trouble with Quadrant One is that you can’t continue operating there forever. Someday something will happen and your Quadrant One business will start to disappear. Sometimes its in a crises and sometime it happens slowly. But it Will happen eventually. It happened to me despite the fact that I knew better. 

When your quadrant one business goes away suddenly you are forced into one or more of the other three quadrants, either selling existing products to new customers (Quadrant II) , selling new products to existing customers (Quadrant III)  or the most risky alternative, new products to new customers (Quadrant IV) . When you operate in those quadrants you have a myriad of new issues to deal with. You cant fall back on your standard processes that worked so well in Quadrant One. You HAVE to do some things differently. 

At BML we help you assemble  a process to evaluate the opportunities in those other 3 quadrants before you are forced to activate them in a crisis situation. We help you do what small businesses seldom do because they cant extract enough time from Quadrant One , we help you compare opportunities, and compare them at the same time against the same standards. 

First we help you find them and define the opportunities, taking them off the dusty shelves and into an active database. They we help you to compare them on the same basis. What is the potential revenue from a given concept? How much time and money is it likely to take to study and implement that concept? Which concepts should be done first and which should be done later? 

We help you choose among them and put together action plans to exploit those opportunities that you pick. 

There are two benefits that come from using this method. 

1. The revenues and profits that come from new opportunities successfully exploited.
2. The savings from not exploiting opportunities thathave a low probability of success or are too costly for the enterprise to sustain.

 

The first of these two benefits is pretty obvious. The second isn’t. But consider for a moment the cost to a business of jumping into the wrong opportunity in a crisis situation. Such a misstep may put company out of business. 

We teach that a company needs  a portfolio of evaluated and ranked  opportunities on the shelf to draw from, either  to feed slowly into the business  or to grab for if quick action is required. We don’t only help you plan them out, we can also provide some of the services needed to evaluate your opportunities, either from our own resources or from our many alliance partners.

 

To learn more send us an email to sales@bmllc.net or call (585)-355-4254 and tell Eric you read this article.

The Business Life Cycle in a Flat World

The following is a talk I gave at the inaugural breakast  of the Independent Entrepreneurs Council , co sponsored by Empire State Science and Technology.  It discusses the transformation going on in the  Western New York  economy from one based on a few large manufacturing firms to a myriad of smaller firms in  service, agriculture, medicine etc.

Download IECOct10.ppt

Novel Inventive Features- A Lesson From Edison

In my business, I work with  inventors and I frequently have to ask them to explain what is the "Novel Inventive Feature"  of the their invention.  I define this feature as that creative aspect of their invention that distinguishes it from everything that has already been invented (The Prior Art).  However, getting this concept across is not easy, hence I thought it might be useful to take a lesson from a master of inventing  Thomas A. Edison.

Every school child knows, if they know nothing more about Edison, that he "Invented the Electric Light".  But what exactly was it that Edison invented.  What was  the "Novel Inventive Feature".  Most people, those at least who have not read a biography of Edison, don't know that there were hundreds of inventors with their own version of the Electric Light working at about the same time as he.  What was it that made his "Electric Light" unique.

In order to explain this I will need to introduce some very elementary concepts from Electrical Engineering.  One of these is "Ohm's Law",  which  states that ,  Electric Current (I) ,which is analogous to the amount of water flowing through a pipe, is equal to  Voltage (V)  (the pressure needed to push the electrons through a resistive elemen,  divided by  Resistance (R)  ,which is a  measure of that  property  which seeks to prevent current from flowing through a resistive element . In algabraic terms this equation is written  I=V/R.

Most of Edison's contemporary inventors thinking "inside the box"  used as the filaments of their light bulbs,  a low resistance wire.  The current needed to light a 100 watt  (P) bulb  with a 1 ohm resistive  filiament can be shown to be 10 Amperes from  solving Ohms law   since Power(P) = Current(I) * Voltage(V)  which  with some  algaebraic manipulation  leads to  P=I^2*R and                   I = SquareRoot (P/R)] .

It doesn't take very many light bulbs (connected in parallel)  drawing this much current to require  very large diameter wires to supply a single household.  To supply a city of many such households using these bulbs would have required  electrical cables  that were many feet in diameter.

Edison, realized this problem and decided to    make a bulb with a high resistance filament , even though he had no idea how to make one. He knew  that if the same  100 watt light had  a 100 ohm filament it would need only 1 ampere to light. He actually went through over 2000 different filament designs before he found one that with the right resistance that wouldn't burn our quickly.           [Experts will note this example is for  Direct Current (DC)  which is what Edison used.   The analysis for Alternating current (AC)  , that we use today is different and more complex]

So Edison's Invention wasn't really the Light Bulb, I was the high resistance light bulb, which made  practical electrical distribution systems with wires of practical size.  High Resistance was the Novel Inventive Feature of Edison's electric light.

AeroLight Chosen for Mock Disaster Drill

Persistance pays off. When David Orange first presented to West Virginia High Technology  Consortium he did not expect SculpTek’s  AeroLight (TM)  Wearable Illumination devices  to  be chosen for the 2005 Mock Disaster  training event. 

The Mock Disaster, which is  played out before a national audience of emergency responders and several government agencies, is sponsored by the West Virginia High Technology  Consortium Foundation's Emergency Response Technology Group  (www.wvhtf.org) and the National Corrections & Law Enforcement Training & Technology Center (www.nclettc.org). This year the drill will be held in Moundsville,WV on September 9th and 10th.

 SculpTek will supply self-illuminated belts, sashes and helmet lights www.activeillumination.com for the Hazmat  Incident Scenario which will be held during nighttime demonstrations.  The government agencies attending   include  The Department of Homeland Security,  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, The Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and The Drug Enforcement Agency.

SculpTek owner, David A. Orange states: "This represents a major validation of our products by the  emergency responder community."

Making the Right Choice to Protect Your Invention

 

When you have made an invention you will have some important decisions to make before you go ahead with to commercialize, license or sell it. In particular you will have to decide how you want to protect it. Often that means applying for a patent , but there are many other choices you could make instead. Each choice has its pros and cons and each is most appropriate for a particular set of goals and circumstances. I have tried to collect those choices into the following table, drawing both from my own experience and from that of experts in the field such as Russ Krajec of the blog “Anything Under the Sun Made by Man".   I hope that you find it useful. 

Patent Choices Table (Click on it  to see  contents)

Whatever choice you make, and you will choose, even if it is to do nothing, that choice will have consequences for the value of your invention and your ability to practice it without interference. Make sure you make the right choice. We at BML are ready to help. Just click on the link for our website or send us an e-mail to find out how.

The Bizmorph Butterfly

Why Business Metamorphosis? 

People often ask why we call our company Business Metamorphosis? A metamorphosis is a transformation, and we at BML we are about business transformation. But that isn’t the reason for our name. This little story tells where the name came from..

 

The  graphic that we use to symbolize our business originated in a dream that I had many years ago long before I left Kodak and founded BML. In my dream a caterpillar gorged itself on leaves until it was so big that it burst. But when it exploded the disgorged contents weren’t digested leaves, they were a flock of beautiful butterflies.  

In this visual metaphor, the caterpillar represented giant corporations like the three that then dominated our community. These companies   were then getting bigger and bigger by devouring all the local economic resources as other behemoths  were doing  all across the United States. 

This kind of growth is not sustainable, and today we see the effects of the Caterpillar explosion as one big company after another sheds  the assets they accumulated in their glory days or  ships the jobs that they  then created to countries where labor is cheap. 

What will support those workers who no longer toil inside the caterpillar? In my metaphor, those workers create a legion of small businesses to rebuild the economic life of the community. 

But creating all those new businesses and making them prosper is by no means an easy task. Most of the former inmates of the caterpillars gut need lots of training and lots of help. Fortunately the resources are available. Finding them, and at a price that the startups can afford is the challenge. 

At BML our mission is to help those small  companies create the economy of the future. To replace the Caterpillar economy with the  Butterfly economy. We help small companies  to 1)Find Opportunities 2) Organize and Manage them, 3) Exploit them and 4) Protect them.

 Call us. We’re there to help. Find out how to contact us at www.bmlcc.net

Leads vs Education

Jim  Payne of S-Market Strategies posted this article  to the website of a group I belong to.  I'm reprinting it with his permission-- You can reach Jim at: www.smarketstrategies.com

In lieu of just acquiring "leads", I would recommend concentrating on opportunities to educate perspective clients.  To reinforce this approach, the Harvard Business review says that marketing yields a return on your investment of 2X, but education yields a 40X return.  In lieu of          spending your time following up on weak "leads", find ways to gain exposure by  educating key targets and making them believers in your value.

As an example, I just did a presentation at a symposium to my target audience in San Diego.  Since the event, I have been busy following up with perspective clients who are contacting me. They now believe in my value and skills based on the educational sessions that I presented.  The session      also resulted in being commissioned to write feature articles for an international industry trade journal in two consecutive months.

Is your business the type that clients hire consultants based on TipClub type of sales techniques?   You can spend your limited time following up on a large number of weak leads or developing educational opportunities that can yield clients who come to you and already believe in you.

Client -Attorney Relations

The link below is to a very interesting article by Rus Krajec describing the complaints  that customers have about   interactions  with their patent attorney.  Many of the complaints  are driven by the practice of  hourly billing.

The article  was particularly interesting to me because our firm bills by the job, not the hour and in fact we are about to introduce a new sub brand called Ala Carte Patent Services that showcases this fact.  Our new website  www.alacartepatents.com should be live in the near future.

If anyone wants to see the new website  in its incomplete state just send an e-mail to sales@businessmetamorphosis.com and request access to the AlaCarte web site.

Link: Anything Under the Sun Made By Man: Observations from a Tradeshow.