The Coronavirus epidemic has brought many changes for individuals and professionals alike. Government-imposed containment is forcing everyone to rethink and improve the way they consume, travel, study, work and much more.
For every crisis, there’s a way out of the crisis, a bend to be taken, which must not be missed, and which must be well anticipated. If you brake too late, you won’t have enough power coming out of the bend; if you brake too early, you’ll lose a lot of power in the bend, so you need to find the right balance.
So, instead of wasting your time on the anxiety-inducing articles and fake news that can be found on social networks, why not take advantage of the pause imposed on your company by this crisis to improve your industrial property strategy, so that you can anticipate the rebound in business that can be expected when you emerge from the confinement, and be the first to turn the corner?
See also our article on the Fake News about the Institut Pasteur’s patent on the Coronavirus.
Patent competitive intelligence
Patent competitive intelligence is generally the most procrastinating area of industrial property strategy.
Taking advantage of the lock-up period to gather information on patent applications filed by your competitors not only gives you a clearer view of their strategies and the directions your competitors are taking, by developing and protecting their innovations, but also enables you to check whether your R&D projects are as innovative as you think they are.
Patent watch can be done using simple, free tools like Google Patents or Espacenet, which are a real goldmine if you have the time to poke around a bit.
An industrial property firm, like YesMyPatent, can take care of this monitoring for you, in a much more comprehensive and detailed way, thanks to subscriptions to worldwide professional databases.
As well as simply keeping an eye on your competitors, you also need to keep an eye on your competitors to gain a better understanding of your market.
You don’t yet have a patented competitive intelligence system and would like to set one up with a professional?
You can also have a patent map drawn up by INPI, or by your own IP consultancy which is able to offer this service. Patent mapping is a tool which enables you to take stock of patent applications filed by all the players in your industry, and to identify emerging trends towards which your competitors are moving, or on the contrary, the areas they are neglecting. Your patent attorney can use it to help you adapt your R&D strategy accordingly.
Contract audit
Contracts are another aspect of industrial property strategy that is often overlooked, often relying on a template found on the Internet, generating (sometimes major) problems in the long term. For innovative companies, they are often based on the exchange of sensitive information and the sharing of industrial property generated during collaboration with a third party.
Have you thought about having the legal department of a company with which you are about to embark on an R&D program read over the collaboration contract? A confidentiality contract with your subcontractor? Do you really know how to use it, and will it protect you in the event of a problem? Do you have an assignment of rights contract signed with the designer of your product? An employment contract stipulating the rights and duties of the salaried inventor?
Now that you have a little more time, these are all important questions you need to address in order to reframe your company legally.
Pull out all your contracts with the various players in your ecosystem, analyze them, call in an IP attorney or a lawyer specialized in IP to carry out a more in-depth audit of your contracts, and if necessary, prepare amendments and modify some of your contracts. Request an audit of your contract portfolio
Invention detection
Taking the time to identify the nuggets you have in store can pay off.
Doesn’t your company have any software, processes, formulations or gizmos that you’ve invented, but not yet marketed or divulged, that have remained as secret know-how or in a corner of a laboratory notebook or in your head, and that it would be worth protecting?
Also read: Filing a patent for an application, software or program
Does this improvement to your product use a particular material that required R&D? Are you sure that your product is not innovative compared to what exists on the market?
The monopoly on an invention belongs to the first to file a patent, not to the first to invent! The patent gives you a 20-year monopoly on the exploitation of your innovation, but there are also other industrial property titles that have been developed by INPI to meet innovation protection needs. Notably, the utility certificate, whose protection was extended to 10 years following the passage of the Pacte Law, or solutions such as the provisional patent, which will arrive in July 2020 in France.
This is a difficult period, but it can be an opportunity to put in place the tools to bounce back. The strategies adopted during this period will be decisive for the future of companies. When the health crisis wakes up in a few weeks or months’ time, many of them will have taken the time to improve their R&D and industrial property strategies, so as to emerge stronger. And to help you maneuver through this bend in the road, we’re here to help you make the most of it.
