Eureka! A light bulb goes off, and suddenly you’ve invented a great new medical device that will save millions of lives worldwide every year.

First things first, you probably want to protect your idea. The most common and formal form of intellectual property (IP) is a patent. A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a country to a patentee for a fixed period of time (usually 20 years) in exchange for a disclosure of an invention. IP rights provide creators of original works economic incentive to develop and share ideas through a form of temporary monopoly. Generally speaking, exclusivity is the desired goal of patenting.

As I mentioned in my last post, there are two keys to patenting: patentability and freedom to operate.

An invention is only patentable if it is useful, novel, and unobvious. A thorough search for prior art will help you determine if it fits this criteria. A handy tool I’ve found is Google Patent Search. You should also search journal articles, white papers, university research groups, and competitors; these mediums count as prior art too. Any prior art you find on your exact device may prevent it from being considered “novel”.

To determine freedom to operate, you should compare claims line by line with competitive patents to see if any of your claims infringe. If it is a really crowded area, you may have to severely restrict your claims. Narrowing your claims can ensure you don’t infringe, but it may decrease the impact or value of your patent.

As you can tell, the heart of a patent is in its claims. Let’s take an example of a patent for one of the first intraocular lenses developed in 1970 (3673616). The claims are listed at the very end of the every patent. For this “Artificial Anterior Chamber Lens” they are extremely broad, and there are only three (I’ve come across other patents that have hundreds). The broad nature of the claims gives the inventors a huge opportunity to exclude others from doing these same things. This patent set up a nice section of real estate in the intraocular lens industry. Since this is one of the original patents on intraocular lenses, all newer inventions had to work around this. The only way they could do that was to make narrower claims, and differentiate their product.

There are millions of patents in the world and while it may seem difficult to find unexplored space, it is certainly possible to carve out room for your invention. Patents can add great value, and be a very important business tool for emerging and established companies, alike.

- Sherri

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