Intellectual Property Services and Innovation Technologies

Invention and Problem-Solving Methodology Overview

Over the past five years, client corporations have been using Innovative Patent Technology's proprietary methodology to create breakthrough products that dominate the marketplace.

Intellectual Property in Today's Marketplace

Innovative Patent Technology helps its client companies plan and develop powerful, pro-active, corporate intellectual property (IP) strategies — major initiatives that produce income and become assets instead of liabilities.

A corporation's intellectual property includes all highly valued intellectual assets - critical products, manufacturing processes, business processes, and proprietary and secret information in the form of trade secrets which the company may not want to release to the public — even in the form of patents. It also includes corporate patents, associated descriptions and drawings, and other important documentation. All corporate intellectual property takes the form of a proactive and defensive corporate patent umbrella.

There is a good reason why intellectual property is so prominent a consideration for corporations today. The corporation with the highest-quality intellectual property dominates the marketplace. It is not the shear number of patents that counts. What counts is the level of these patents, and the degree of real patent-infringement protection.

As common sense might dictate, an analysis of the global patent collection clearly indicates that the world's inventions are distributed among different levels (see figure). Companies having the rights to higher-level patents achieve market dominance. They accomplish this by conceiving and developing Higher Level products, which largely come from patent levels 3, 4 and 5 (which represent less than 15 percent of all global patents).

Innovative Patent Technology, through corporate programs with top managers and technical professionals, assists its client companies in the rapid conception and development of high-level, Higher Level products. These companies establish quality intellectual property portfolios. These corporate IP portfolios are pro-active, in that they include impossible-to-compete-with, breakthrough products. They also offer maximum protection against future patent infringement.

The Ability to Conceive & Patent Intellectual Property on Demand Innovative Patent Technology has been involved in some of the most esoteric product and conceptual work going on in the world of corporate research and development, and has developed the capability of predicting — and identifying in design detail — Higher Level products, technical processes and other business processes. All this is possible because of Innovative Patent Technology's proprietary Intellectual Property Generator Software, IP Generator, which allows client companies to conceive and patent inventions on demand. Intellectual Property Generator rapidly conceives Higher Level products that are patentable. These become an important, integral part of Innovative Patent Technology's client corporations' intellectual property portfolio, and also form a part of a corporation's corporate patent umbrella. The bottom line is that Innovative Patent Technology's client corporations are the only ones in the world who enjoy this capability. It is now possible for corporations to establish intellectual property portfolios largely consisting of level 3, level 4 and level 5 inventions.

Avoiding 'Legal Patent Infringement' Even when a company's inventions are high-level and patented, it's still possible for competitors to get around them through perfectly legal and artful modifications, and by dancing around a basic invention. To counter such actions, and to make it virtually impossible for competitors to infringe, Innovative Patent Technology guides your corporate technical professionals through a process for establishing 'patent thickets.'

A patent thicket is a carefully planned group of patents, related to a major patent, which stand as barriers to would-be infringers. Each patent in the thicket addresses intellectual property domains closely related to a major patent. The whole system (i.e., the major patent and the surrounding patent thicket) makes it literally impossible for a potential infringer to successfully 'attack' the basic, major patent (without being challenged by one or more of the related patents in the patent thicket). Patent thickets are achieved by employing Innovative Patent Technology's Next-Generation Thinking approach, which includes over a dozen creative problem-solving and design-creation tools.

A little known, pro-active secret for Innovative Patent Technology's clients only: by applying a special creative approach called Infringement Analysis to already established, competitive patents, your company can rapidly find the weaknesses of the competitive patents, and leap-frog over them to a next-generation product line, avoiding the threat of infringing upon the competitive patents. In fact, your next-generation designs may be broadly different from the competitive designs initially analyzed.

Results of Applying Innovative Patent Technology's Corporate Intellectual Property Strategy The following results accrue from establishing your company's IP Initiative (as guided by Innovative Patent Technology):

• Your company's intellectual property (IP) productivity rate is multiplied many times over, producing brilliant, patentable product lines and associated manufacturing processes — and even business processes.
• Acquisition of a strategic, intellectual property umbrella which offers superior infringement protection, and serves as a repository of valuable information, while achieving market domination in a pro-active manner.
• Your corporation gains the capability to conceive and create intellectual property at will — on demand. Perhaps for the first time ever, the process of corporate inventing is under precise management and control. The value of the ability to 'patent on demand' is at the multi-million dollars level, for any corporation.
• Corporate technical professionals acquire the capability to solve the very toughest technical problems and design challenges, while permanently improving their creative-thinking skills. The fruits of their efforts appear as patentable, Higher Level product-design concepts.
• Through Innovative Patent Technology's unique IP Analyzer, your corporation is able to divide all corporate intellectual property into several key parts, all of which are income-producers. These parts include: 1) obsolete or non-pertinent patents, which can be sold or licensed at a profit, or disposed of (thereby reducing associated maintenance costs); 2) key patents which support major patents; and 3) major patents which need to be protected at all costs, and which are candidates for continual improvement through conceptual efforts.
• Additionally, Innovative Patent Technology brings you the capability to predict the future, by using IP Technology Forecaster, a predictive tool that identifies future technologies leading to next-generation products. The application of IP Technology Forecaster can be employed to establish your company's five-year R&D plan.

Innovative Patent Technology works closely with your corporate technical professionals and subject-matter experts as they move through a Corporate Total Product Development Program involving the three critical stages of total product development: Concept Design; Robust Design and Tolerance Design. These three design stages need to be accomplished

• At the highest level - producing next-generation products that allow your company to dominate the marketplace.
• Rapidly - by significantly slicing the normal time that it takes to conceive, develop and field a new product line.
• Inexpensively - at a minimal expenditure of dollars, company & supplier resources, and time.

Best-In-Class Approaches and Tools Innovative Patent Technology has developed, for its corporate clients, revolutionary approaches and tools for accomplishing these 'cheaper, faster and better' requirements. This gives you the corporate capability of moving through the Total Product Development Cycle in a revolutionary manner. Applying these tools and approaches requires an in-depth understanding of the three stages of engineering design (see figure below) - an understanding that is absolutely necessary in order to create, develop and field Higher Level Products.

Concept Design Stage The corporate goal for this stage is to conceive next-generation, breakthrough products — products that lead to your company capturing an increasing share of the market. The Concept Design Stage begins with your corporate strategy, which may include making significant improvements to existing product lines, as well as conceiving, developing and manufacturing revolutionary, next-generation product lines.

The best in-class approach for accomplishing this is Innovative Patent Technology's Higher Level Thinking™ approach, which leads to Higher Level products and also to significantly improved, existing products.

Innovative Patent Technology stands ready to assist your company in rapidly yet effectively formulating these goals. Besides the contributions of corporate top management, success in the Concept Design Stage requires the participation of your corporate technical professionals, along with Innovative Patent Technology's expertise in Higher Level Thinking™ and its toolbox of creative product design, product conception and problem solving tools. There is a success equation for the Concept Design Stage:

SME + NGT = NGP.

SME is an acronym for Subject-Matter Expertise, meaning those technical professionals (scientists, engineers and others) who have solid knowledge and experience in those engineering and scientific disciplines related to your corporation's product lines.

NGT is an acronym for Higher Level Thinking™, the revolutionary product-conception and problem solving approach developed by Innovative Patent Technology for its corporate clients, who want to dominate the marketplace.

NGP is the result: Higher Level Products, which are really impossible-to-compete-with products.

A corporate product-line strategy leads to the formulation of specific technical requirements. These can be framed as questions asked by corporate management: "What are the real technical problems which either prevent significant improvement, or which appear to stand in the way of achieving next-generation products? What are the characteristics of our Higher Level Products?" The tools of Higher Level Thinking™ are very capable of answering these significant questions. The responses represent your company's first step towards market domination.

The responses to the above questions are stated in such a way. They include both technical conflict statements and physical contradiction statements - stating 'the problem or goal' in this way is a prerequisite for achieving high-level product concepts. The next step is to apply Higher Level Thinking™ tools to each project or goal selected by the corporate team. This results in next-generation product concepts which then have to be screened, further refined and then combined. The resulting breakthrough products are elegant and yet simple in their design.

Innovative Patent Technology's proprietary concept-screening techniques are used to arrive at the final, Higher Level product line. Working prototypes are built for each breakthrough product resulting from this screening. These product prototypes represent very high-level designs (see Levels of Patents in the Glossary), usually invention levels 3 through 5.

Robust Design Stage The output from the Concept Design Stage is a working, product prototype. A prototype is an initial, usually full-scale, functional form of a new product design. Such a design 'works,' but its functional performance is not optimized, and it is not designed for lowest cost. These optimization and cost-reduction steps are accomplished in the next stage, the Robust Design Stage. The goal of the Robust Design Stage is to make the product (as well as the means of manufacturing it) 'robust.'

A robust product has a performance that is insensitive to all types of variation or variability that frequently causes less-superior products to fail. Robust products work, and work well, in spite of manufacturing variability, in spite of supplier variability, in spite of the variability of materials and parts, in spite of operational variabilities (including the weather, vibration, etc.), and in spite of the ways customers and users treat the product after it is shipped. The Robust Design Stage rapidly and inexpensively produces world-class products.

The approach of choice for accomplishing this is Innovative Patent Technology's Robust Design Methodology — a combined engineering and business approach for achieving robust products and processes, rapidly and at low cost. With Robust Design, the total product development cycle occurs in a way that is truly "Cheaper, Faster and Better." Cheaper - meaning that the cost of total product development is minimized. Faster - meaning that the total product development is streamlined, with only the essentials retained (anything not essential is waste!). Better - meaning that the quality and the performance of the resulting products are superior to anything else in the marketplace. Altogether, this is an unbeatable combination.

During the Robust Design Stage, Innovative Patent Technology works closely with your technical experts to assure that engineering experimentation is directed in an optimal way, through the use of Innovative Patent Technology's unique Robust Design Methodology.

Tolerance Design Stage The final (and third) stage of engineering design is Tolerance Design, during which your company's next-generation, robust product undergoes final quality improvement, as well as cost reductions. The approaches of the past - inspection and statistical process control (SPC) - are inadequate to satisfy today's global customers. Businesses can no longer prosper by continuing to operate a profitable business with outdated or obsolete approaches to quality.

Innovative Patent Technologys Loss Function-Based Approach surpasses traditional approaches to tolerance design. Traditional approaches attempt to achieve a 'balance' between quality and cost. Loss Function Thinking bases tolerancing and material-grade decisions on one parameter and one parameter only: Cost. Innovative Patent Technology's Loss Function Thinking makes tolerancing and material-grade decisions — decisions that are directly related to the engineering performance parameters of the product. This means that design engineers know the cost implications when they make decisions about tolerances, material grades and component quality levels.

An Integrated Total Product Development Program Your corporate technical staff learns and absorbs all these tools and approaches as they are applying them to your company's breakthrough products. Product Development within your corporation will never be the same, after these tools and approaches are once applied. The idea of "Cheaper, Faster and Better" becomes a reality.