Establishing a Corporate Patent Culture: Training and Education
Nothing is more frustrating than watching a competitor copy a new product that your company developed at substantial cost, both in terms of time and money. On second thought, one thing that is more frustrating is when this copying occurs as part of, or as a result of, an employee leaving to go work for that competitor. Without patent protection, copying and reverse engineering of new products is entirely legal. Since the copier incurs substantially less in development costs, the copier's products are often priced substantially below the original product.
To prevent this from happening and to encourage employees to consider patenting important innovations and key technological developments, it is necessary to develop a corporate awareness of patents. The Reinhart Intellectual Property Practice partners with its clients to help them raise patent awareness amongst employees. Successful programs of raising patent awareness typically have several characteristics.
The first key to protecting an employer's intellectual property is to ensure that all employees, or at least all technical employees who may develop new inventions, have signed appropriate agreements to ensure that they will keep the employer's proprietary information confidential, and that they will assign any inventions they develop to the employer. While ownership of copyrightable matter created by employees (but not by consultants) is owned by the employer without such an agreement, the same is not necessarily true of inventions made by employees. We can prepare such agreements for employers.
A second key is that technical employees, as well as key members of management, are provided with a good working knowledge of patents and other intellectual property. "One particular issue includes educating key members of management and R&D about the critical timeline for filing patent applications relative to disclosing or offering to sell the innovations developed by the client." The best way to educate employees is through an on-site seminar that teaches the essentials of patents with an overview of intellectual property. Reinhart's intellectual property lawyers have presented such seminars for clients in a wide variety of technologies, with each presentation being tailored for the particular client, technology and audience.
A third key is to ensure that new technology is properly documented and considered for patenting. Through the use of lab notebooks and good engineering habits, records can be established to document when new technology was developed. Through the use of Invention Disclosure forms provided by Reinhart intellectual property lawyers, a permanent record of new inventions can be made for later use in patentability searching and patenting.
The final key is carefully considering whether new products should be patented. By raising the awareness of patents through the establishment of a corporate patent culture, new ideas can be patented and competitors can be prevented from merely copying innovative technology and new products.