Patent Baristas

In Great Patents: Advanced Strategies For Innovative Growth Companies, Editor David Orange provides a collection of topics set out by experienced industry insiders.

Great Patents is billed as a book on patent strategy that bridges the gap between primers, intended for those with minimal patent knowledge, and advanced books, serving practicing legal professionals.  Divided into to sections, Strategies and Valuation, the book covers topics including venture capital, portfolio management, government contracts, assessing damages and patent sale.

The book is really geared towards guiding the small to mid-sized technology-based company in IP strategies.  It acknowledges that companies pursue patents to make money and there may be strategies that companies do not currently use.

In the section “How a Young Company can Build and Manage its Intellectual Property,” Lawrence Rozsnyai of Metabolex lays out best practices for developing an intellectual property portfolio.  Rozsnyai offers this:

What are your business goals?  What is your competitive position?  As patents make business sense only in supporting your commercial business objectives, answering these questions will be key in determining which patents you need to have and which patents will be nice to have.  Focus on protecting your core ideas first.  Then you can move on to protecting additional ideas or working on ways to extend the patent life of your core commercial product.

In the section “Obtaining Patents and Trade Secrets for Health Technology Companies,” Kevin McCabe of Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox writes:

The value of intellectual property (IP) to the start-up or early stage company, especially those companies focused in the areas o biotechnology and medical technologies … cannot be underestimated.  Although all industry segments rely upon IP, health technology companies are particularly reliant upon IP.  Therefore, it is critically important for health technology companies to understand the various aspects of IP, what each form of IP protection provides, and the limitations associated with each IP form.

Great Patents offers much guidance for the company that understands the basics of patents but is ready to move deeper.

Great Patents: Advanced Strategies For Innovative Growth Companies, David Orange (editor) Logos Press, 198 pp., is available from Amazon.

About the Author

David B. Orange is a patent attorney in Washington, DC. He is active in the start-up space as an investor and advisor.