Do you Really Own your Patent?

If you are an inventor you may believe that your name on the patent is all you need to establish ownership of your invention.   That would be a very wrong and dangerous assumption to make. Unless you are the only named inventor and you have signed no assignment documents, your rights may be very much less than you believe.

If you made your invention as part of your job , you may well have signed an assignment agreement with your company.   That agreement may have been signed long ago when you joined the company and you have completely forgotten about it.   It might be worth a trip to the HR department to take a look at what it says.

Many such agreements are written extremely broadly. Inventors often think that something they create on their own time with their own resources belongs to them but that is frequently not so. The patent assignment agreement I and many of my colleagues signed said essentially that if I invented a teapot in my basement it belonged to the company (and my company didn't make teapots).

But suppose you didn't make your invention for a company but with a group of colleagues. All you names are on the invention.  

The rules then can be equally problematic.   The law says that any of the inventors may sell the patent without permission or knowledge of the others. It doesn't matter where e the sellers name appears in the list of inventors , it could be first or last appears in the list of inventors , it could be first or last, the result is the same.

 The way to protect yourself (and your company) is with a properly drafted and executed patent assignment agreement which determines the future ownership of any intellectual property created during any project or joint venture no matter what inventors are listed on the patent application.

 A good IP attorney can draft such an agreement, but deciding what belongs in one is another matter.   It's a business decision  and that's where we can be of help.  So please check us out at Ala Carte Patent Services , write us at rblazey@businessmetamorphosi.com or  give us a call at (585) 520-3539  and let us tell you how we can help make sure you own what you worked on and paid for.

Exploiting Opportunities

 How OA can help you take ideas off the shelf and get them earning cash for you.

These days many businesses are looking for new revenue sources. The cash cow products that carried the business in the past are earning less money than before or worse being displaced by new technologies that offer other ways of doing the same thing better and cheaper for the customer.   You don't have to look very far to see this happening.   Look for example at the recording industry that used to make their money selling CD's in stores and now has to complete with online downloads of single songs to IPOD's.   My own former employer, despite valiant attempts to make it in a digital world is a shadow of the Goliath it was when the only way to take pictures was on the film and photographic paper they made.

This means that companies need to look elsewhere for new products.   When I say elsewhere, I mean outside of what we call the Business Comfort Zone (or Quadrant One) , selling existing products to existing customers.   What passes for new product development in far too many companies is simply tweaking the existing products with incremental changes, keeping the companies well inside of their comfort zones.

Companies who hide in their Comfort Zone can't compete with the likes companies like Apple who boldly move to exploit opportunities in the other three zones. Allowing them to capture wholly new customers for their existing products, or get more orders from their existing customer with really new products. Opportunity Associates has a tested process that helps companies identify quantify and compare those unexploited opportunities so that they can take action on them.

Checkout our website Opportunity Associates . Or for more information Please email rblazey@businessmetamorphosis.com .

 Or if you prefer call Richard Blazey at  (585) 520-3539. Be sure to mention Opportunity Associates when you call.