For a technology company, your patent strategy should be as detailed as, and align with, your business plan. In general, your business plan addresses three primary questions: 1. What products am I bringing to market? 2. What will it cost? And 3. Is it worth it? These questions are not easy to answer and involve forecasting three to five (or more) years into the future.
Similarly, your patent strategy should address three primary questions: 1. How many patents do I need regarding the products I’m bringing to market? 2. What will it cost? And 3. Is it worth it? Like your business plan, the three questions of patent strategy are not easy to answer and involve forecasting three to seven (or more) years into the future.
If you do an internet search for “How many patents do I need,” you’ll get all kinds of answers, including “Enough to suit your goals”. This was the answer I learned when I started as a patent attorney thirty-eight years ago. It was the answer I gave to a C-level executive of a client ten years into my career. He responded, “I’ve heard that for decades. I want a number.”
I was taken back. That answer always worked in the past–but it didn’t that day. I struggled to come up with a response, finally telling him I would get back to him with an answer.
I meant it. The next day, I started researching “How many patents do I need?” Since this was in the mid-90’s, most of my research was manual: Shifting through countless articles, legal publications, etc. The only answer I found was a general rule of thumb, “Spend about 10% of your R&D budget on patents.”
There was no real answer and that bothered me. So, I began working on my own answer. It turns out that this is an extremely difficult question to answer and it took me fifteen years of creating and experimenting with data models and data analysis techniques to provide a reliable answer. But, I do have a reliable methodology to answer this question now and it works well. Needless to say, I never got back to that C-level executive with a definitive answer.
I’ll discuss the details of answering “How many patents do I need” in future articles. I’ll also discuss the other primary questions: What will it cost and is it worth it in future articles. When the number of patents is known, determining the cost is not that hard. The trick is then providing a reliable answer to “Is it worth it?”
**Please note that this article is not legal advice; it is not a legal opinion; nor should you rely on it as legal advice or as a legal opinion. This article merely expresses the author’s general thoughts on a topic regarding the business of patents. Nothing in this article establishes any form of an attorney-client relationship between you, the reader, and the author of this article.
