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This newsletter is for the benefit of: our customers both current and past, our workers , board members and friends including those of you we haven't talked to recently. Please feel free to forward to others who might be interested in our activities
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Why Getting a Patent is Harder
In our recent talk "Patent Secrets Seldom Shared" and its relateded blog articles we described the patent prosecution process and showed how it was like a trial. In recent conversations with patent attorney Tracy Jong, we were updated on a series of recent changes at the patent office that combine to make getting a patent more difficult.
As we reported in the talk, it used to be common practice to give the inventor three tries to convince the examiner to approve the application before issuing a "Final Rejection". Now the examiner may issue a Final Rejection after one or two office actions. The inventor is forced to choose between a RCE (Request for Continued Examination)
or an Appeal. Both of these cost additional patent office fees of $400-$800 depending on the size of the applicants company.
- Rabbits Out of Hats are SOP
In the talk I mentioned a common practice in patent proscution which I called "Rabbits out of the Hat". This occurs when your attorney has satisified the examiners arguments regarding one piece of prior art in a one office action and the examiner pulls out a surprise never seen prior art reference for the next office action. This practice which was common is now SOP for all patent prosecutions according to Tracy Jong .
Allowance rates which measure the ratio of patents granted to patents applied for used to be about 70%. AR hit an all time low of 50% in March 2010. It has now rebounded but is still low.
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What's my patent worth?
Just about every inventor with a patent wants to know what its worth. But establishing patent value is a very tricky proposition. The only sure answer is what is true of any product. A patent worth what a willing buyer will pay for it.
Short of actually offering your patent for sale and finding out that way what its worth, are there other methods of establishing value? It turns out that there are many. The value of a patent is inextricably tied to the value of the technology it protects. If the technology is worthless , so is the patent. If the technology is worth billions, so is the patent.
Other factors that help determine patent worth are the age (how long is it still good), the strength of the patent (how easy is it to circumvent), the breadth of the patent (how much of the patent landscape does it protect) etc. Scholarly experts have constructed elaborate financial models to predict these parameters.
At ITTr we offer a very simple 10 question multiple choice test to determine what we call a Rule of Thumb or ROTH analysis.
Our ROTH score on a 100 point scale is fundamentally a measure of how commercialized a patent is because that is one of the most important factors in the minds of prospective buyers.
ROTH analyis is FREE and gives inventors an idea of whether it is worth persuing their invention further into commercialization and how far away they are from attracting a buyer. To find the ROTH form scroll to the middle of the page linked here. You will find the form and a link to click to fill it in.
When we return your ROTH score we will also send along information on how you can contact ITTr about selling or licensing your patent.
If you want to learn more about how ITTr can help you please go to our website |
First Look™
Quick and less expensive due diligence
The Rochester Penguin Group (RPG) produced a First Look™ due diligence report targeting an online vendor in a expedited pilot project. RPG was hired on the basis of our sample report reviewing Wegmans Food Markets Inc*. Although the sample report was compiled over several months, the client required the pilot project report to be delivered in only 6 days.
The online vendor we were researching was privately held, so little of the key financial information necessary to analyze the company was available in public records. The financial information gleaned from public sources put the company's annual revenues within a broad range - anywhere from $500,000 to well over $5M.
Penguin put a research and analysis team on an extended schedule working nights and weekends to find and analyze the information necessary for our client to evaluate the company. The team was able to find primary and secondary sources of information that were analyzed by financial professionals on the team to deduce the assumptions that went into the various earnings estimates that were in the public domain and to tighten the revenue estimates.
In the short 6 day period we were able to compile a report containing information comparable to what we had provided for an extensive sample report on Wegmans Food Markets Inc. The report contained 95% of the information from the Wegmans Food Markets Inc. report including revenue information that we calculated from publicly available sources.
*A copy of the Wegman's sample report is available by request. from Rochester Penguin Group |
